Website internationalisation #4

To be more inclusive, the website could be made translatable (and at a later stage actually translated).

This incurs an important effort, but is also a way to be more inclusive.

I would be favorable to such a choice. What are your thoughts?

Excellent point. Very easy to do that from the beginning. Extremely difficult after the fact. Luckily https://translate.codeberg.org/ provides Weblate. Using it for this simple website will help get used to the workflow and switch from crowdin to weblate eventually.

I'm sure, we could start with English, German, French and Dutch!
Spanish and Portuguese on top would be amazing!

I'm sure, we could start with English, German, French and Dutch!
Spanish and Portuguese on top would be amazing!

I suggest we also include Chinese if possible since a substantial fraction of the Gitea developers and userbase is Chinese. For instance, the Gitea README is in both English and translated to Chinese.

Spanish and Portuguese on top would be amazing!

My Spanish is good enough for an initial translation and I can probably get Portuguese going too, though obviously input from native speakers would be far better.

I don't imagine English will be a problem at all but for what it's worth my native language is British English so I'm happy to give a look over anything written by non-native speakers before it's published.

Sorry, clumsy fingers on mobile...

No consideration was given to this in #37, so it will have to be retro-fitted. I have no experience with internationalising Astro sites but I'm sure we can work something out.

I'm sure, we could start with English, German, French and Dutch!
Spanish and Portuguese on top would be amazing!

I suggest we also include Chinese if possible since a substantial fraction of the Gitea developers and userbase is Chinese. For instance, the Gitea README is in both English and translated to Chinese.

Good point to think inclusive beyond our western perspektive 🌏

In addition

• Hindi is the 3rd most spoken language
• India's community is the 2nd largest on Github

No consideration was given to this in #37, so it will have to be retro-fitted. I have no experience with internationalising Astro sites but I'm sure we can work something out.

github.com/advanced-astro/astro-i18next
Still in beta, I'll give it a try

I've already done quite a lot of work on this, sorry for not pushing anything yet to share my work (it's in a very unfinished state still).
Just letting you know so work isn't duplicated.

I've been short on time but I'll try and clean it up a bit tonight or tomorrow and get to a state where I can share it.

This would be very valuable because we are about to publish a call for an accessibility survey and it would be very good to do it in several languages.
In any case, it is not mandatory to have all languages in the launch so this is not a blocking factor.

I pushed the work I've done to #57. It's very much unfinished but I think it was going in the right direction. I'm not sure if I'll have time to come back to it in the near future so if anyone wants to pick it up from there that's fine. Otherwise I'll resume work when I get a chance.

In addition

• Hindi is the 3rd most spoken language
• India's community is the 2nd largest on Github

I speak and write basic Hindi, if there are no other contributors I can help with it.

Since early 2024 Forgejo has it's own Weblate project, a localization team and many translators around. It can handle addition of the website.

I have heard that the markdown support on weblate is rather poor, do you have any insights into that?

As I understand it, this exact issue is about website UI, not about docs contents.

Not sure about markdown actually. But I'm sure that unless we can get it split into at least paragraphs as separate strings, translator UX will be indeed poor.

As we currently don't plan/have the resources to translate documentation and news, I don't see much of an advantage in having the website UI translated. It would create an inconsistent user experience with many links to English pages. With advanced and easily accessible translation tools (e.g., integrated in Firefox), I also think that the need for localization is less (although I know that these tools often do mistakes that can convey wrong messages).