AFAIK is AllMusic.com (which I always tend to substitute with AllAmericanMusic in my mind 
) the only provider for this kind of content in Roon and doesn’t offer any non-english content. The problem is, that such content is generally copyrighted. So what should Roon do? The only thing that comes in to my mind, is sending the contents to a online translation service (like eg. translate.google.com), fetching the result and present that instead. What are possible drawbacks of such a solution?
- The current license may not allow Roon to provide such a service.
- The quality, and thus usefulness, of the automatic translation might vary greatly depending on the target language.
- The translation service may not allow such use or may ask for a paid usage right.
- Limited service because of excessive traffic.
- And so on … I’m sure there are many more.
What are the alternatives?
- Roon is doing it’s own thing. Very unlikely, but who knows.
- Roon searches for other language content providers that offer a commercial license (that’s reasonably priced), good quality and broad coverage. Maybe already ongoing, but nothing is announced so far.
What is my conclusion as a non-english native language speaker?
It’s nice to have a translated UI, but for users that are able to read and understand the diverse descriptive content provided, it’s not needed and for users that need the translated UI, the diverse descriptive content provided is largely of no use. To really emerge the product into international non-native english markets, a complementary set of content is needed.
I would like to recommend the product to friends and colleagues, but the lack of understandable content prevents this in most cases. It’s a pity.