Investigate multi-language capabilities

[fifieldt]

Not everyone wanting to apply for the Gold Card can handle large blocks of English text. If we were to get a sufficient number of contributors who could write in a language other than English, it might be worth having the site available in other languages.

This is probably some time in the future, but in the meantime, perhaps we shouldn't do anything that would explicitly prevent a multi-language version of the site coming into existence :)

It looks like in hugo it's surprisingly straightforward.

For the content - just needs to be the same filename with a language tag and a bit of config
https://gohugo.io/content-management/multilingual/
https://regisphilibert.com/blog/2018/08/hugo-multilingual-part-1-managing-content-translation/

then there's a Language.lang element in the .Sites page property that can be use as a switch in templates for logic and an i18n shortcode that can use po files for template wording.

[hasnouille]

I like the idea in principle but I think it's a lot of work. My first thought would be to have polyglot members self-identify to support folks whose English may be a barrier to apply for the GC.

[matrinox]

I haven't used any personally but I know there are cheap ways to outsource translations. We might sacrifice somewhat on quality but we can reach a larger audience quickly this way

[fifieldt]

One other idea that Markus Wolf mentioned the other day was the idea of minimal 'landing pages'. These pages offer a greeting a given language, explain the program in a sentence or two, apologise that the site's not in the given language at the moment and then send people to the English site. Markus said he's implemented it on some larger projects and the feedback was excellent, since it makes users feel like the site cares about their specific circumstance :)

[matrinox]

@fifieldt perfect! I really like that idea. We could also link them to a google translated version of the app, for e.g.:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=zh-TW&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftaiwangoldcard.com