Feature request: translation using crowdin

[ilenia-magoni]

The main freeCodeCamp repo now uses crowdin as a way to translate the documentation. I don’t know if it would work for this repo too but it’s a proposal for that.

[comradekingu]

You want "How to contribute to open source" on a closed source translation platform?

[erictleung]

Thanks for making this suggestion @ieahleen! I was chatting with @nhcarrigan about this, who has a bit more knowledge about how Crowdin works and here's his response on it:

"I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember there being concerns about the overhead of using Crowdin for this project. With Crowdin we would need dedicated volunteer proofreaders for each language to approve translations - additionally, these approved translations need to be accurate because they'll affect the translation memory (recommended translations offered by crowdin) for all of our other projects. Certainly happy to re-evaluate this, if we feel that there's a need to use Crowdin for the project."

So from what I gather, adding Crowdin might be too much overhead for this kind of repository, despite the code infrastructure being in place for the main repo. It may get a bit messier for this repo, but I think as long as people use the Suggest Changes feature in a PR review, that should make it nicer.

Other barriers to the existing method include getting other people to review their translations. I could put somewhere in contributions or the PR template to share their translation PR on their social media, our forums, or chat for help. That may speed up some lag in translations being pulled in. A second (or complementary) method that might also work is for me to do a quick Google Translate check on the translation updates and then have other contributors make edits as they see fit. This second method will inevitably create more errors initially, but will in time generate a good enough translation. This second method reminds me more of a Wikipedia-style way of edits.