Figure out i18n strategy for spec text

[wincent]

Splitting this off from #330.

We'd like to enable translations of the spec into other languages in a scalable (ie. crowd-sourced), convenient (ie. minimizing manual synchronization work), high-quality (ie. community-reviewed and supported) way. Crowdin has been successfully used by other projects with FB involvement (eg. Jest, Yarn), although I am not sure how easily it can be adapted to our Markdown-centric workflow. Let's investigate.

[rmosolgo]

Just to be clear, this is for translating the specification, right? Not for adding a i18n strategy to GraphQL?

[wincent]

@rmosolgo: Yep. Let me edit the title to clarify that.

[jonirrings]

hi, @wincent , sorry if bothered,
I've already translated one version of the spec into Chinese, and am looking for the translation team where I am in to proofread.

is there any guide to contribute to the spec translation?

[leebyron]

Just want to highlight this as a potential high impact project for a motivated potential contributor.

There are a few things we'll need to do here:

• Define the impact. Let's spend our effort on specifically translating into languages where there is a broad impact. My thinking is: given a language X, what portion of the technical community of native speakers of language X do not understand English. Eg. if there are 10,000 native speakers of Klingon, 10% of which are in a technical field, and 80% of those also understand English, then the potential impact for translating to Klingon is to reach 200 additional people (10,000 * 10% * (1 - 80%)).

  I am ignorant of the impact per language, so knowing our reach will help us prioritize and rationalize the work.

• Process How and when should translation occur? I don't think it's feasible to continuously translate the draft and RFCs into all languages. Perhaps only one we've cut a final version should translation begin. As future versions are cut, they can be diffed against the prior version to determine what additional translation work is necessary.

• Organization Where should translated files live? I'd suggest spec/translations/<ISO 639-1 Code>/Section.md

• Deployment How should translated files get deployed to the spec website? I think we will need to present links to each language available for a given version on the index page and generate spec-md builds for every translated language.

• People! Each language needs at least 2 people who understand that language very well so there can be a review process. If we can keep track of these people in a file in the repo, that would be useful.

[sai5839448]

😁