As a sovereign cloud nation we are bound to have people from across the globe joining as citizens. Some of these people may neither have English as first language nor be fluent in it enough to really participate and benefit much from the many services Nation3 may be offering in the future.
For the above reason and also because having one or more designated official languages is usually one of the important hallmarks of a sovereign nation or international organization, wouldn’t it make sense to adopt a few languages as official languages?
The Nation3 website would be made available in the designated official languages and all important docs including the Nation3 manifesto and the planned constitution would also be made available in those languages. We could start with 3-5 languages and add more languages with time as Nation3 grows.
Would love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and which languages to initially adopt and what metrics should be used in choosing the languages to adopt.
We already translated the wiki to Chinese. The process was documented in GitHub so that it can be repeated for more languages in the future: Enable i18n · Issue #12 · nation3/wiki · GitHub
Does the website support similar i18n functionality as the wiki?
Also keep in mind that once you start adding translations, there will be a maintenance cost. The more translations, the higher the future cost of adjusting the original English text.
Sadly until real-time translation is widely available I think we should keep one common language for direct communication.
On the other hand, I have nothing to say against having docs and UI translated to multiple languages, but I agree with @aahna that those implies a maintenance cost that maybe is not worth right now, but community contributions are always welcome.
Meant for this post to start a conversation around the subject of making Nation3 truly transnational and more easily welcoming to everyone around the globe irrespective of their native language. In the near future it might be necessary to create a Translation Guild that would be tasked with the responsibility of handling all translation related tasks.