Think about i18n and l10n

[zkamvar]

There are different levels for translation for a website:

1. Translation of the menus and the messages (e.g. 404)
2. Translation of the prose.

The former is relatively easy, the latter is quite complicated and involves tradeoffs.

David Pérez-Suárez gave a really good talk about this in his CarpentryCon talk: https://youtu.be/IzRCuk7XX18

His solution was to have a centralized hub to hold translations and work with git submodules to control when those translations would be updated. It's not a trivial issue because there's a balance of effort on the maintainers and the contributors. David had mentioned that the updates would only flag translation files, but the result would remain unchanged until a translator comes along and translates the changes.

To address the translation of the prose within the document, they modified https://github.com/carpentries-i18n/po4gitbook to work with the kramdown tags. Looking elsewhere, it doesn't seem that there's really any other good solution to translating markdown to po and back again.

I believe some of this process can be improved by implementing translation to XML on the backend since that provides a clear structure for lists, paragraphs, etc. The challenge is to match that to a clear grammar for how the po files are to be structured.

There's a good breakdown of the tasks necessary for i18n: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/What_is_i18n,_what_is_l10n#I18N

I looked into how the Hugo Learn theme does i18n (https://learn.netlify.app/en/cont/i18n/), but it appears that they have a basic structure for the message translation for the menus and messages, but the prose is expected to live in separate files in separate repositories.