internationalization

[nicolaskempf57]

I think it would be nice to be able to configure the language of a Storyden instance.

It won't add much complexity to the code and the community could provide translations for their own languages.

From my understanding of the project, it requires 3 things :

• allowing to change the ˋen` from the html tag and maybe other tags if any
• adding a i18n library to handle the logic
• wrap user interface content in a function or component to allow the replacement based on the configured language

I can work on a PR if you're interested.

[Southclaws]

Absolutely this has been on my roadmap as I have a few friends who run Russian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, etc. communities and have brought this up. Storyden aims to be a platform for all people!

One slight hitch is the error messages returned from the API side are also in English, I plan to tackle this with a fixed set of known error codes that frontend implementations can satisfy with translations.

As for the UI, you're right it should be fairly simple to swap out UI labels with translated lookups.

Two challenges I would like to ensure are done right:

1. Server side rendering of the initial static HTML content should respect standard headers (Next.js does have tooling for this already I believe, though we won't use the routing based internationalisation as it introduces quite a lot of complexity.)
2. Bundle size increases for language packs backed into the distributed Storyden software

For two, I would prefer some kind of language pack that's decentralised, community driven and swappable. Mainly because if you run a Russian community, you likely will keep it Russian forever and would not swap to another language. So there's no point in including 50+ language packs increasing the build time and bundle size. I'm not exactly sure how this may be solved yet but it should be achievable. If language packs were simple JSON files they become sharable, updatable and editable by Storyden contributors or third parties or Storyden operators.

But perhaps the first step is to introduce the foundation for doing this then tackle that later. Curious to hear your thoughts on the above two points!