Dashpay.io Goes Multilingual

In our quest to conquer the world, communicating with it seems like a sensible next step. Until now we were publishing everything in English, with the occasional translation of an announcement here and there. That changes today.

We proudly announce that dashpay.io is now multiligual. Today we are launching Russian and Spanish translations. You can see the selector in the top right corner and in the bottom. We are also working in the Chinese translation, which we expect to publish soon. The three were going to launch together, but Chinese is a uber complicated language and it is taking a bit more time than expected.

Depending on how we measure the impact of translations we can get to different numbers, but all them are great. Today we are increasing our reach a lot:
-From 360 million to 920 million of native speakers. Soon we’ll add almost another billion when we finish Chinese.
-From 1.2 billion of English speakers to 1.9 billion speakers of the three combined. Soon we will add 1.3 billion more with Chinese.

The Russian translation has been mostly done by @alex-ru and he has been super helpful to determine what should be the process to optimize the translation to new languages. Future volunteers will have a much easier time thanks to him. I did the Spanish translation with help from @aleix. @Alexy and @Raico are working on the Chinese one. And no, having an Alex based name was a not a requisite to translate ? @UdjinM6 assisted me in the evaluation of the translation solutions we were considering.

The solution we are using creates new pages for each language version, with links in local language. Besides being super cool to have links in cyrillic characters, it should be great for SEO.

If you find any problem in the translations, please report it through Jira. We have a project for the website and it is going to be the only way to keep things tidy now that it is growing so much in complexity.

Next languages

Our plan is not to simply translate the site, we want to maintain it alive and translate new announcements. Each language requires a lot of work, both from translators and in the backend. For that reason, we will tackle additional languages gradually and only when we are sure that there is enough manpower to maintain them and audience to read them.

Any decision about what languages to translate next can be questioned, but I’m thinking German, French and Portuguese. For this selection, I’m taking into consideration the size of the respective Dash community, the traffic to dashpay.io and the size of the language. Those three rank well in at least a couple of the lists. We still need translators to volunteer, so nothing is decided yet. Other candidates that would make sense are Indonesian (not on top in any list, but it is a huge country, we have some relevant traffic from there and bitcoin.co.id is a top 10 exchange for Dash… clearly there is some interest), Dutch and Polish (both rank really well in community, but they are not very big and population usually speaks English very well). At the end of the post I include some tables to inform the discussion.

Please, let’s not get too emotional about what languages to launch next. I can only manage a few translations at a time right now, but we can do a few more after we finish next batch!

Anyone interested in volunteering, please reach out to me at [email protected].