In my own add-on (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1032589920), I implemented a feature that directs users to the help documentation in their own language:
Attention! This add-on will change the Anki help URL if the Anki interface language is set to one of the following: Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Arabic, or Simplified Chinese (the same site applies to Taiwan). No other languages are included, either because the existing sites are outdated or because their site structure differs.
It would be ideal if the help documentation automatically appeared in the language the user has selected, just as I’ve implemented in my add-on. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll maintain the documentation moving forward, but I’ll likely continue doing so through 2026; after that, perhaps someone else can take it on—life being what it is, you never know what tomorrow might bring.
The official manual developed by Japanese contributors is the “Anki日本語マニュアル Wiki”, ideally this should be updated, but this Wiki has hardly been updated at all and has become outdated.
“はじめに - Ankiマニュアル” is an unofficial version that I developed and released myself. This version was released with some inaccuracies in the translation, I’ve been reviewing it but it’s not yet complete so I haven’t linked to it from the official AnkiManual yet.
If the manual is to be translated by AI rather than humans, wouldn’t it be sufficient for the official Anki team to use AI to handle both the translation and checking themselves? They have a budget so I think they can use more advanced AI than volunteers can, also if they update the translations regularly I think they could keep the latest versions available for all languages. It seems like too much of a burden for volunteers to check the massive volume of documents generated in bulk by AI or to handle the migration of all those documents.
I asked @toakiryu to post here to get more feedback from native speakers and confirm there are no obvious issues (like inconsistent terminology or mismatches with the UI).
The documentation is in English. While Google’s browser can translate it into other languages, the quality of such translations is often poor. Attempting to use AI for translation hasn’t yielded satisfactory results either.
Some people do use such translations, but most simply stick to the English version.
For an AI to be effective, it would need to be familiar with the specific terminology used in Anki. Furthermore, the terms used in the software interface must match those found in the documentation—ensuring this consistency is the main challenge when configuring an AI for the task.
When I took on the Russian translation, I updated the terms in both the interface and the documentation, so they are now perfectly aligned.
While it was a drawback to work on this alone, it was also an advantage; coordinating and getting approvals from others would have taken significantly more time.
If you know English, a translation might not even be necessary. However, I do try to provide translations for add-ons, as they might be used by children who aren’t necessarily fluent in English—and besides, Anki is used for much more than just language learning. It is an extremely time-consuming process, and there’s no guarantee that an automated translation tool will get the terminology right in another language.
I can only hope that, in the future, AI will be able to handle these translations accurately, and that users will be able to simply highlight a piece of text (or a button) and click a “translation error” link. In the past, many websites allowed users to highlight an error and report it instantly by pressing “Ctrl+Enter.” I still implement this feature on some of the sites I manage, but most websites no longer prioritize linguistic accuracy—sadly, even journalists have seen a decline in the quality of their writing. Often, there is no mechanism for quick feedback, meaning users have no way to report an error or inaccuracy the moment they encounter it. Ideally, an interface should be adaptable to the user; for instance, if a user wants a button to be labeled differently, they should have the option to change its name In fact, even when an official translation is available, a user might still want to create their own version.
In fact, even when an official translation is available, a user might still want to create their own version.