context

This is not a bug per se, I think it's more a documentation request, as I have all the difficulties in the world understanding how to support parralel build of the same documentation in multiple languages. What I would like to do here is write down what I understood, wait for your answers, and when it will work propose some updates to the RDT documentation.

Note that I come here after reading:

• https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/manage-translations-sphinx.html
• https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/localization.html#project-with-multiple-translations
• https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/advanced/intl.html
• Support multiple languages from single conf.py source #4338

The behavior I would like to reproduce is the one from the Sphinx documentation itself.

step 1 prepare the repository

For the sake of example I created a pet project here: https://github.com/12rambau/docs. The documentation is hosted here: https://docs-test-pierrick.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

First I prepared the appropiate files using sphinx and sphinx-intl:

sphinx-build -b gettext

To generate the .pot files

sphinx-intl update -p build/gettext -l fr

To create the .po files in /locale.
In these translation files, I added the translations in french and tested the documentation by changing the language parameter in my conf.py file. At the moment everything is sent to my distant repo but some cleaning will be necessary once I better understand what is regenerated on the fly.

step 2: deploy on RDT

Now is the real deal, how to activate these different versions in RDT. I would like to make it as automatic as possible so that when I updated stuff on transifex/crowdin I don't have 7 RDT projects to update and check.

What I think I should do is:

• create 1 extra project per language
• register them in the translation section of my "master" project

My question are then:

• How can I set the language to build without setting multiple conf.py (I checked sphinx there is only one)?
• Can I create multiple projects from the same repository ?
• Is there a trick to autodetect the available languages with some parameters in .readthedocs.yaml or simply by setting locale_dirs in my conf.py ?