Editor's note: welcome to the Minimum Viable Changelog! This is a recurring series where I, the faithful developer of Minimum Viable Ceremonies, will attempt to keep you, the voracious and handsome reader, up-to-date with the happenings around developing this thing I find very cool. I'm hoping it's at least one of the following: informative, entertaining, so-bad-it's-good, or SEO optimized. Please tweet me at @gdpelican if you have opinions you'd like to share, and enjoy!
One thing that I was a real pain-in-the-arse about at the very beginning of this project was that we would make internationalization a first-class citizen in our product offering.
I worked for a long time at Loomio, and one of the things we did right there in my opinion was very intentionally cultivating an international community of translators to keep the app available in dozens of languages. It definitely felt hard at times, but the dividends were obvious: our largest and most active groups were entirely in Spanish. We developed invaluable partnerships with people from Greece, Sweden, Morocco, and many other places. We were part of a Korean revolution. It was just very clearly Worth It™, and it's essential to do it from the start, because once your app is up and running in Just English, it's very very difficult to prioritize the work needed to translate it; your developers will always, always have something better to do than pull out hundreds (or thousands!) of strings into translation files.
Check out how we use CrowdIn for offering a super easy way to contribute translations to the app:
Check out our translation community here, and please contribute if you can!