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We had to discontinue our official translations back in February. Please read more about this at https://www.akeebabackup.com/home/news/1673-discontinuing-%E2%80%9Cofficial%E2%80%9D-translations-for-akeeba-software.html

To be fairly honest, the French translation of Akeeba Backup was only 70% done. The translation for ANGIE was even worse, around 50%.

When I saw that, I looked into download stats for languages. I intentionally leave English and Greek out since I was managing both. The top translations were French, German and Spanish. French was very incomplete and the translator told me that I had to use his favorite translation tool (at $10,000 per year) or he wouldn't contribute any more translations. The German translator was doing superhuman efforts in short bursts, depending on his time - usually the language was 90% to 100% translated. Spanish was also around 70% translated. That was to say that people would have to speak English or they wouldn't be able to use the software. More so when the important messages we had added the last 18 months were untranslated in most languages.

Moreover, all the documentation and support is in English. I looked into translating it but at hundreds of pages and an average of 30 updates a year that was more money than our total sales volume - just for a few major languages (French, Spanish, German, Dutch). So, clearly, either a person speaks English or they can't use the software efficiently.

The final observation I made was that some messages conveyed the opposite meaning of what I had written. This happened when the translator misunderstood the message and translated something other than what I wrote. It makes for very "fun" support tickets, where the user insists that the developer is an idiot for giving patently bad advice in the software itself. This was the case with French in at least two separate messages. Good thing I speak enough French to figure out from a screenshot (no Google Translate, then) that the message was reading something I had definitely not written and would never write because it's contrary to the security advice I give in my security presentation. I don't want to even guess how many people might have been mislead by a wrong translation in a language I don't speak and haven't reported anything back to me.

And that's how we ended up without translations. On paper, translations are great. In practice it's impossible to find someone willing to do the hard work for the meager pay a small, open source software company can provide. Also a bad translation is worse than no translation at all. Since I only speak English and Greek proficiently and between the four of us here the only other language we speak is Italian I had to discontinue translations and stick with English.