[i18n] Make user documentation localizable

[FitikWasTaken]

Both the Fediverse and the BlueSky has a big share of non-English speaking users

Fediverse has a big amount of non-English users (second and third biggest mastodon instances are Japanese speaking) and the BlueSky has a big amount of non-English users as well

I think it would be very nice if fed.brid.gy and fed.brid.gy /docs could be translated, as it would answer questions non-English users might have too

Ideally it could be translatable on a service like Crowdin/Weblate/Transifex etc

[snarfed]

This is a great idea! I'd love to have the docs and front page localized. Thanks for the suggestion, and for the translation service ideas!

It's not my highest priority right now, but it could be a great project for another contributor to work on, especially someone familiar with the workflow for those translation services.

In the meantime, @FitikWasTaken do you speak Japanese or Portuguese or another language popular on Bluesky or the fediverse right now? Any idea how good Google Translate is with the docs, eg https://fed-brid-gy.translate.goog/docs?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=pt&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp ?

[FitikWasTaken]

I don't speak neither of these languages sadly, I speak 3 other languages (Russian, Hebrew and Esperanto), but all of these languages are currently unsupported on BlueSky, even if they have small communities on Fedi/Bsky.

I checked how good automatic translation for Russian and it's uhh okay, it's understandable/intelligible, at least for me, but it's not perfect, it's not very grammatically correct, structured weirdly and uses some weird terms that aren't used on Fedi/BlueSky.

For example it have translated "mutes" in the context of blocks as "turning off audio" and various small mistakes like that. It also translates "follows" literally, like "stalks" and that sounds kinda creepy.

You can have built in auto translator if you don't want to deal with it, I seen websites that use it, also technically then you'll be supporting all languages google translate supports (Like 300 of them). It's obviously worse for smaller languages(Like Hebrew) as they have smaller text corpus.

[qazmlp]

Any idea how good Google Translate is with the docs, eg https://fed-brid-gy.translate.goog/docs?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=pt&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp ?

It doesn't seem idiomatic to me. It's understandable, but likely not good enough to show by default based on the browser language, or at least I hate when websites do that with German. (My Portuguese isn't good however. I can read most simple and technical texts but not write it without a translator.)

You could add a link to Google-translate the current page somewhere near the top.

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Regarding Japanese, most auto-translation is really pretty abysmal and can cause misunderstandings. It's possible to make it work by using non-idiomatic English as input, but that's a skill by itself. (I can speak and write Japanese roughly at "tourist" level, but it's enough to understand inflection.)

You could still add the Google Translate link as users are mostly aware of how bad it is. Many Japanese users prefer DeepL Translate since its output feels more natural, but in my experience it often makes factual mistakes instead. ("Currency conversion", negating some sentences, repetitions, things like that.)