Lacks internationalization

[joyeusenoelle]

The Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon is only available in English! My skill in other modern languages isn't strong enough to translate it myself, and I don't want to rely on auto-translation services. If you're willing to take on the task of translating the Guide, please feel free to do so and submit a PR! Thank you!

[TheOtherDoctor]

I'd actually consider doing so, just I'm technically too unexperienced with this subject yet, and I am unsure on how to get started - so I'd like to hear comments on how you'd prefer to have others provide a translated README.md:

Looking through github on how to do this, I see the approach of adding READMEs with extra filename suffix containing the ISO 639-1 abbreviation as the most common, for example in the github doc itself. Even if this has been mentioned to allow for quite some imprecision, looks to me there is nothing much better, and it seems fairly easy to get started. The alternative would be expanding the single document to contain multi languages...
I'd prefer the former multi-file approach, which leads to a question of how to sync content as work (on the master) is going onward - I am unsure how to make sure the translation and the master are at same content state. When something gets changed/fixed in the master, we should at least indicate any delay/difference (which unavoidable will come) - maybe just pragmatically put the date of referred master to the head of the translated README.xy.md?

My last (personal) doubt is that the only translation I could provide is german, which is most likely not the most missing one - as the developer is german. On the other hand - actually I see lots of articles about Mastodon's role and impact, but few on the (user-relevant part of) practical howto. ;-)

[douban-meiko]

Hi, @joyeusenoelle!
I'm interested in getting a locale in my native language Chinese. Personally, I lack patience in translating. But I just thought about (maybe?) a creative way to crowdsource this:

What I have been trying to do recently is to make a Mastodon tips bot in Chinese user's context. It might be like FediTips but
it'd be fully automated. And unlike FediTips, it will not reboot or promote any instance/user/project/opinion unless it's extremely relevant to helping people use Mastodon from functionality's prospective. It will be a very simple mechanism: randomly pick an item from a list of very short and readable tips, and post it. The frequency may be twice a day.

This bot in Chinese will be helpful for myself, but if it by any chance gain some popularity (I'll try my best to find a balance between marketing it and not being too spamming; and I own a 500+ followers bot and a 200+ followers bot in Chinese on Mastodon today), I can make this bot post a short text extracted from this doc once a day, and beg the followers to translate it in the reply. I'll also make sure to include information of that how they want to get credited during this process (many users from China are not okay with exposing their account outside Mastodon for good reasons).

I think, over time, we can get this locale done. What do you think about this?

[joyeusenoelle]

If you'd like to do this I think it's a lovely idea, and I'll be more than happy to incorporate a crowdsourced translation in any language. :)