Improve discoverability of translations

[harding]

When trying to reply to this comment on Reddit, it took me a while to find links to the Japanese translations---and I knew they were there. I don't have any specific suggestions, but I think we could certainly improve discoverability.

Related: #285 for a Japanese RSS feed.

[murchandamus]

Yeah, I definitely see what you mean. Maybe we could put the [en/ja/es] in the head navigation, if it doesn't look too obtrusive?

[bitschmidty]

It seems the lack of translation was not clear in the reddit post since the person was viewing an individual newsletter page that did not (yet) have a translation. So the language bar was not even visible. One way to indicate the (potential, future) availability of translation could be to show a gray out link for languages that are not yet available. As opposed to hiding the translation language bar entirely.

Here is an example idea:

As to making that bar more noticeable, we can use flag icons as Ive seen on other websites.

[murchandamus]

Hah, I didn't know that this was there either, because I usually only glance at it right after we publish it. 😅

We only have a couple Spanish translations overall, but the Japanese ones come out regularly. It might look a bit silly if we always had the greyed out Spanish there (although it might get some people to notice and pick it up!).

[jnewbery]

The greyed out link for languages that don't yet have a translation could direct to a page that says something like "The {language} translation for this newsletter is not available yet. If you'd like to help translate or review, please contact the optech team/go to the github/etc. In the mean time, here are the previous newsletters that have been translated into {language}".

[harding]

@bitschmidty

Putting greyed-out language codes in the header of pages without the corresponding transactions SGTM. I think we should stick with the two letter code names---languages and national flags don't correspond anywhere near 1:1 (e.g. are we using the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes for English?). I agree with @xekyo that we probably don't want to list any currently unsupported languages like Spanish except where we already have translations for content.

I do think we only want to display the bar on pages that we currently have infrastructure to translate (e.g. yes for newsletters, no for topics). I think that can be done with a per-page/post variable that's set through for groups of pages/posts via the defaults dict in _config.yml.

[murchandamus]

By the way, Chaincode Labs recently hosted a Bitcoin Protocol Developer seminar in Spanish. There were some people that were looking to do more for the Spanish speaking community. Do you mind if I point out to them that we have some Spanish translations for the newsletter? Optionally, I could also ask if they knew people that might be interested in contributing to additional translations.

[jnewbery]

Do you mind if I point out to them that we have some Spanish translations for the newsletter? Optionally, I could also ask if they knew people that might be interested in contributing to additional translations.

That'd be awesome. Thanks @xekyo.

The guide for contributing translations is here: https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#translations.