Support for languages other than English on Bitwish

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. :slight_smile: 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?