Documentation is an important part of any software project. It's a great teaching resource, reference material, and even a good advert for the project. But documentation is often limited to one specific language. This tends to be English, which the software world treats as a lingua franca. English is widely spoken across the world due to colonialism, but its continued dominance is the result of Euro/America-centric viewpoints. Languages such as Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish are just as widely spoken, but aren't used as a primary language in software projects as often as English.
Here at Funkwhale we've been doing a lot of work to improve our documentation. We've made our layout more consistent and made our language more accessible. But what we've wanted most is to have our documentation available to people in their own language. Doing this increases our reach and welcomes more users.
What are we doing to address this?
We're happy to announce that our documentation is available on our Weblate instance 🎉 This means that volunteers can submit localizations for our documentation in their language.
Our rewrites have focused on simplifying and improving the wording of our documentation. This should make localizing everything much easier 💪 If you want to get involved, check out the project on Weblate.
Thanks to Georg for setting all of this up! We hope this will be a big help for our community. Once we have some submissions, we'll start work on implementing a language switcher in our docs to let people choose their language 🌐