i18n and reaching non-English soeakers

[leftieFriele]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is the topic of those who don't speak / write / read English. We could do a direct translation of all pages for many things and that would solve this to some degree.

However for things like the mentor pages it would perhaps be a good idea to have it include something about the language of the mentor or perhaps sort them by country or perhaps cities. Reaching out to a mentor if you aren't fluent in English can be a very big step. Trying to promote local mentors would be a good thing.

Same thing goes for discussions. If using GH issues for discussions we might need different repos for different languages.

[mcollina]

Unfortunately I agree: having a translated website will be really helpful for newcomers. Count me in for Italian translations and as an Italian-speaking mentor.

[bnoordhuis]

FWIW, I agree as well. As an example, I've noticed that speakers of Asian languages are massively underrepresented relative to the user base. I urge people to sign up at https://github.com/node-forward/mentors

[leftieFriele]

@bnoordhuis Would it make contributing as a Mentor easier if we looked at making categories such as spoken/written language preference and/or geography?

[bnoordhuis]

@leftieFriele I think so. However, I'm not really involved with the welcome/mentor program; you'd have to take that up with @hackygolucky or @jasonrhodes.

[jasonrhodes]

@leftieFriele -- by "categories" do you mean having a place for listed mentors to mention that information alongside their name and short description? If so I think that makes sense--I think we have some work to do with /mentors. I'll start a discussion at /mentors/issues and reference this one so we can start to work through those things.

I also think general i18n of our welcome and other content would be good to figure out right out of the gate. There has been some good conversation about this recently for NodeSchool and the workshopper tool here: nodeschool/organizers#64 (comment)

Makes sense to pay attention and see if we can make a similar effort.

[leftieFriele]

@jasonrhodes I was originally thinking different sections, but I think your idea might be better to have this as addition info for each mentor.