Implement Translation/Multi-Language Functionality

[michaelweinold]

At the request of Brightway resident linguist @tngTUDOR work is to commence to add multi-language functionality to the Brightway documentation.

As luck would have it, I recently came across this PR in the pydata-sphinx-theme repo related to a project that uses translations heavily:

As you support heavy translation I would be happy to promote it to featured afterward, please open an issue if I forget.

• https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/pull/1217
• https://decentralchain.io

Perhaps we could take some inspiration from their setup.

[michaelweinold]

If I might be so bold, @tngTUDOR : What is the real case for this? My main concerns:

• [x] The API will be in English in any case. Is this just about translating some of the "explanations" pages (Introduction, LCA, FAQ)?
• [ ] Browser translation might work better even if we set multi-lang support perfectly, without the need for any overhead on our side.

[tngTUDOR]

yes, I was thinking specifically about the "explanations" pages themselves. @michaelweinold can you point me to what you mean by "browser translation" ?

[michaelweinold]

can you point me to what you mean by "browser translation"?

Chrome (native) Safari (native) Firefox (plugin)

[michaelweinold]

...maybe as additional food for thought:

How would we ensure that contributions such as eg. https://github.com/brightway-lca/brightway-documentation/pull/118 are propagated to the other-than-English branches?

Would we auto-translate those (in which case, 👀 browser translation) or would we need to set up a strategy that assigns language experts (from the Brightway developers?) to these PRs?

[michaelweinold]

Closing this for now - localisation of the entire (or part of) documentation would be a major effort that should only be undertaken after the English-language content of the documentation has been expanded/consolidated.