Sub-communities for different languages

[whyrusleeping]

Someone brought up recently on IRC that it would be nice to have places to chat with ipfstronauts in languages other than english, in particular russian was asked for.

Theres many different ways we could do this, but it should be done carefully. I'm opening this issue as a place for us to discuss the right way forward here.

[lemmi]

To summarize a couple of thoughts I brought up on IRC:

• At the moment, IPFS is accessible by tech-savvy people for the most part. Knowing english is almost a requirement to work in that field. I don't think that right now other languages are adding any real value.
• Communities in other languages need access to documentation. Otherwise english versions will need to be referred to and then people still need to know english. Someone also needs to keep up with the current rapid development keep these documents from becoming obsolete.
• You, as developers, will loose direct feedback.

These are more or less points against officially supporting different languages right now. But I'm also quite confident, that when there are enough people in one particular language you will get wind of it. Of course I might be wrong and maybe there already is some community large enough out there :)

[zinovi]

I think that official multilingual support risks splitting the focus of our community.

On the other hand, if there is no path of integrating the multi-lingual communities, they will form outside, in isolation.

That could lead to fragmenting. Russian communities are prime example, as they are vibrant and tend to form on their own. That leads to a situation in which a lot of high-quality content is available exclusively on obscure (for a person that does not understand the language) Russian sites. In some cases that has led to forks and project splitting.

An important point - English should be canonical. Meaning - if something is important, there should be an English version. If we talk of a conversation, at least the notes should be available in English.

[Admin-DataRoads]

While most online tech communities are indeed English-first, any sufficiently large user-facing projects will need to have their UX and documentation localized eventually, which means embedding translation services as part of the core build process.

https://opensource.com/article/17/6/open-source-localization-tools

To the extent that IPFS works with global nonprofit organizations, there will also be a need for translation services just to interact with their community members and stakeholders, and both open source and nonprofit translation services exist for these purposes.

https://translatorswithoutborders.org/about-us/

Finding a way to make these nonprofits and any volunteer translators valued community members early on will pay off in global UX localization later. Continuous translation between language communities (where English can remain a sort of hub node between these language communities), with the help of some automated translation tools, will also help retain more community-wide social cohesion.

[dryajov]

Someone brought up recently on IRC that it would be nice to have places to chat with ipfstronauts in languages other than english, in particular russian was asked for.

I think this is really important. While many non english speakers will be able to read technical documentation in english, asking questions is a whole different thing and a skill that many will lack. Having language specific subforums/irc channels should help those communities flourish and help with adoption outside of the english speaking world.

On the other hand, if there is no path of integrating the multi-lingual communities, they will form outside, in isolation.

This is an important point and something that we can't avoid, however having a "official" place to come to for support/learning will help mitigate that, IMO.

P.S.

I can help with Russian and Spanish