Building a multilingual Space, part I

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dodhara_Chadani_Bridge,_Kanchanpur.jpg

A critical part of Space’s mission is to offer a welcoming and accessible place for all movement contributors. And how can you be welcoming, accessible and monolingual, you ask? Great question. You can’t. 

Today, we officially embarked on the (long and winding) journey toward making Space a fully-functioning multilingual forum. 

Your language preference can now be set in your interface preferences. Anonymous users will have their language automatically set from their web browser’s language headers.

When using another language you’ll notice that, while Discourse software’s content is translated to varying degrees, all of the content that we have customized in our theme (like the header menu, for example) remains in English. Our next step is to add localizable strings to our theme components to make the UI smoother across languages.

As said, this is just the beginning, and even Discourse translations are far from complete. Notice something missing in your language? You can contribute!

Discourse is being translated by the Discourse community in Transifex. To get started, sign up for an account and join the Discourse project.

To support translators, both in the context of Space and in the Wikimedia projects in general, we are also opening a new category in Space, Translations. Translators have been a cornerstone of our movement, doing the difficult but critical work of making Wikimedia content accessible across the globe. This category will serve as a hub for translators to connect, collaborate and support one another. Have a look around the new category, and change your notifications settings to “Watching” to stay up to date on all conversations within it.

If you’re interested in how multilingual features will continue to be developed into the future, and in providing input on the overall plan, feel free to comment in Discussions in many languages, organized by tags, or open a new topic in Translations.