Per this comment from @profpetervickers on issue #70, it may be desirable in future to support translations for this application. This is good general practice, and though not a strong priority for the project at this time for our 2026 work, I'm raising an issue on the repository to track thoughts over time for future interest.
Both React and Django, the core technologies powering the front and back end of this application respectively, support internationalisation:
More information on the concept is available from Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Internationalization
The work in the case of this app involves extracting hard-coded strings into e.g. a JSON file, tagging them by language, then referencing them within the application. We have some prior experience on this within the ARC team (myself and @ItIsJordan have done this sort of thing before, supporting Arabic translations within a Cultural Heritage application).
Once the English strings are extracted and correctly referenced, a translator can create an internationalised version of the website with relative ease. Obviously, the strings themselves are not the only aspect of internationalisation. Date formats and text directionality (e.g. right-to-left scripts like Arabic) are a further consideration, but well supported by the above frameworks.
Further, because some pages of the application are rendered from Markdown, we can refactor the markdown documents into folders by ISO-639 language code, and load the correct prose by reference to the user's location and browser/OS language preferences.
This issue will sit on the back-burner for the time being, but we can lay the groundwork for more thorough translation at any point by implementing these technologies.
Per this comment from @profpetervickers on issue #70, it may be desirable in future to support translations for this application. This is good general practice, and though not a strong priority for the project at this time for our 2026 work, I'm raising an issue on the repository to track thoughts over time for future interest.
Both React and Django, the core technologies powering the front and back end of this application respectively, support internationalisation:
More information on the concept is available from Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Internationalization
The work in the case of this app involves extracting hard-coded strings into e.g. a JSON file, tagging them by language, then referencing them within the application. We have some prior experience on this within the ARC team (myself and @ItIsJordan have done this sort of thing before, supporting Arabic translations within a Cultural Heritage application).
Once the English strings are extracted and correctly referenced, a translator can create an internationalised version of the website with relative ease. Obviously, the strings themselves are not the only aspect of internationalisation. Date formats and text directionality (e.g. right-to-left scripts like Arabic) are a further consideration, but well supported by the above frameworks.
Further, because some pages of the application are rendered from Markdown, we can refactor the markdown documents into folders by ISO-639 language code, and load the correct prose by reference to the user's location and browser/OS language preferences.
This issue will sit on the back-burner for the time being, but we can lay the groundwork for more thorough translation at any point by implementing these technologies.