i18n capabilities

[sotayamashita]

My friends and I would like to translate this website into Japanese. If you have any idea for localization?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts 😄

Warm regards,
Sota

[kborchers]

Hello Sota,

I am terribly sorry for the long delay in response. We somehow missed this. If you and your friends are still interested, I would be very interested in discussing how we might proceed with the translation. Please let me know here if you are still interested and we will begin figuring out how to handle translations on our side.

Thank you!

[sotayamashita]

@kborchers

I would be very interested in discussing how we might proceed with the translation.

Cool. We are still interested in it. Recently we are creating translation tool named GitLocalize. It is used by Google and Vue.js community now.

[kborchers]

The content for this site is no longer maintained in GitHub but is instead in WordPress which means this would likely need to be more of a manual translation. Is this still something you would want to do or do you have ideas how to better automate that process in WordPress?

[sotayamashita]

@kborchers Sorry not to replay fast. Unfortunately, we do not support the Wordpress.

do you have ideas how to better automate that process in WordPress?

What about to use https://www.transifex.com/integrations/wordpress/. I hope it will help.

[kborchers]

Sorry we lost track of this issue. Pulling in @dmethvin, our TAC chair, to have another responsible party. We will ensure this issue is discussed soon and will return with the outcomes of that discussion.

[dmethvin]

Again, sorry for the delay. I see two steps for this. The first is to determine the technology and/or service we use to do the translation and the second is to determine how we can perform translations both for the initial site and ongoing updates.

Since Wordpress is pretty widely used we should not have a problem finding solutions for pages written in multiple languages. Here are some options: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-easily-create-a-multilingual-wordpress-site/

The transifex.com solution described above is expensive, $139/month at the lowest level, so I don't think it would be cost-effective unless they were willing to provide it at no cost to non-profit organizations. It does have the benefit of being able to use that company's translators (at an additional cost I suspect). PolyLang also has partnered with professional translators should we need them.

Assuming we can find an appropriate technology, we then need to determine our rules on translations. The initial translation is a large amount of work, but it is a one-time effort . I assume we need to translate both the content of specific pages plus the page templates that include headers and footers.

For newly created pages and page updates, the need to translate the page adds another step or two in this process. Will translators be available in the coming months and years when we need to add content? If not, is it okay to just have that content in English? How do we notify translators of new content to be translated? If the changes are to the wording in an existing page, can we provide a "diff" of the old and new to reduce the amount of work?

There is also the issue of how to create users with appropriately limited levels of Wordpress access. That is, a translator should have the ability to translate an existing document but not necessarily to create new documents or edit existing ones in a language they do not translate. I have not looked at the details of how that would be done. This is more of an issue with ongoing updates. For initial translation we could simply have one authorized Wordpress user who could take the translated documents and put them into Wordpress.

Thinking about the level of coordination required for updates, I wonder if it would be possible to start with a simple setup and rule. Perhaps we choose the PolyLang plugin and only translate a few of the top-level pages for now, the ones that rarely need to be updated? That way we can avoid answering the hard questions for now and see how it works.