Idea is to be able to post language-specific content (especially in Video Guide it would be useful to have links on tutorials on specific language), and also ability to filter content by language (perhaps would be good idea to multi-select language for those who can read/speak more than one).
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I was very happy to see this request! It relates to this:
As someone who has English as a second language, this is a topic close to my heart. Bitwig and anything else in life becomes easier and more interesting when you have some peers that speak your language.
Just FYI, I’m a native Spanish and Catalan speaker. I have seen a few videos about Bitwig in Spanish but didn’t contact the authors because right now we have everything in English and we don’t have anything clear to offer. I also understand some German, and there are many tutorials about Bitwig in German i.e. by @OdoSendaidokai . Same thing, I haven’t added any because right now we don’t have a good fit.
To your question. The answer is YES, BUT. 
There are social aspects and technical aspects.
The social aspects are:
- Contributors. It is evident that to consider a language we need to have users willing to contribute to Bitwish in that language.
- Moderators. We also need at least one person understanding that language that the Bitwish admins and moderators can trust. Automatic translation does wonders, but that also means extra work, and it’s basically not an option if some problem arises and a discussion in that language is necessary.
There are several possible technical solutions, some of them more simple, manual, imperfect, other more sophisticated, also complex. I’d say that we could match technical offer with social demand. Start simple, and continue simple until the amount of users and languages make clear that a more sophisticated setup is needed.
The simplest setup could be:
- A very simple process to request a new language.
- When a new language is supported, a “welcome” topic,a tag, and just a couple more details are created, so that speakers of that language can be even aware that their language is now supported.
- Topics in that language could be created, they would be tagged accordingly, and users could subscribe or mute to the tag depending on how much they would care.
- We would need to set some rules. For instance, Drafts and features cannot simply have new topics that are translated versions of existing topics. With the Video Guide we would need to see how to organize it (here too one thing would be to start with one topic for language or to replicate the entire Guide structure, an extreme example).
We can do all of the above with Discourse core and a bit of organization.
Then, we can do more with plugins:
There is a third party plugin for Discourse that in theory covers everything you are suggesting and more. It is a beast of a plugin. I mean, it touches many areas of Discourse.
We could also offer automatic translation of posts, which would be pretty neat but can cost money (how much, depends of API use):
I’ll stop here. What do you think?
regarding Contributors - not a problem, just a matter of time to populate different topics that need content.
about moderation, that I understand and perhaps solution would be to add language support one-by-one on demand and with selection of at least 1 moderator among the community to look after specific language sections. probably better idea to have 2 as minimum though, to open up specific language section. and of course every moderator have to also speak english.
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Very good, so where do we start?
For the sake of testing, I can act as moderator for Spanish until someone else steps in.
@x.iso , I guess you have something in mind.
Who else wants support for a specific language?
I would volunteer for Russian segment. but I do think that we need more than 1 representative for each language, although I think we can ask here or in Discord (we definitely have more russian speaking people there for instance)
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Yes, two people is definitely better. Let’s continue this conversation and we’ll see who else shows up. Then, when we have something more specific, we can do outreach here on Bitwish (i,e. putting a banner) and if we want more, I agree that on Discord we could find more.
Ok, imagine that we start supporting Russian. What does this mean for Russian speakers? What do they find here on Bitwish?
well, I think Video Guide with posts on russian would be most sought for, for feature requests I don’t think it’ll work, you wouldn’t want votes scattered to different languages of same feature.
What about this “offer” to new languages:
- Language listed on top navigation bar under
symbol in the top left. - One tag for the local name of the language plus its synonym in English, to identify topics written in that language. This allows users to subscribe or mute to these topics at once.
- One topic under #about-bitwish to welcome and support speakers of that language.
- Optionally, one topic under #bitwig-video-guide to collect tutorials in your language. Possibility to spin-off new topics if the quantity of tutorials justify it.
- Possibility to create topics in #music and #about-bitwish .
- Possibility to create feature requests in your language in #brainstorm , where they can be discussed in your language (they need to be translated to English in order to be accepted as #drafts ).
- Possibility to have a group for speakers of your language, and a corresponding badge.
I think if possible, better use specific language flag with English being default, and then if multiple languages selected, then show globe instead. This would help immediately discover this feature.
I agree with the rest of the points
Right now the label on the navigation bar would be static and the same for everyone, just like “Wishlist”. I need to look at what is possible to localize the navigation bar.
In any case, associating country flags with languages is problematic. We would need a different solution, like i.e. standard abbreviations / language codes.
abbreviation could work as well
Feature implemented!
I’m not very happy about the FontAwesome icon ‘language’ + “EN” combination in the navigation bar, but this is the best I could produce yesterday evening when I could only think of going to sleep.
I think a good solution would be to have the icon alone and bigger. It is possible to remove the “EN” and retain the link, but the icon alone is too small. I bet it can be made bigger with CSS but this is where I got stuck yesterday. Any CSS ace around?
I usually just use inspector in browser and look up existing CSS, then see what I can edit or add. for instance if you change this here to 2em
the icon gets just enough bigger
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Thank you for the hint. I hope it looks better now?
.top-menu .d-icon {
opacity: 1;
min-width: 2em;
font-size: 1.3em;
&:not(.d-icon-caret-right) {
margin-right: 0;
.rtl & {
margin-right: 0;
margin-left: 0;
}
}
}
a.menu-item:nth-child(1) {
padding: 0;
}