Localization of scikit-learn website content.

Hi,

I work for Quansight Labs and am helping set things up for translation of main project website content for core projects in the Scientific Python ecosystem. This work is supported by the [Scientific Python Community & Communications Infrastructure grant](https://scientific-python.org/doc/scientific-python-community-and-communications-infrastructure-2022.pdf) from CZI. I created a Github discussion for this here: https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/discussions/28105, but @glemaitre pointed out that an issue would be more appropriate.

A deliverable for this grant is to have the brochure websites of at least 8 of the 10 Scientific Python core projects translated into at least 3 commonly used languages. You may have seen the language drop-down selector at https://numpy.org/.  The goal is for a cross functional team of Quansight staff and volunteers to handle the bulk of the work, taking the burden off of project maintainers.

The localization management platform [Crowdin](https://crowdin.com/) is offering a free supported enterprise organization for Scientific Python translations. This is the platform we used for numpy.org. At this moment you would not need to decide what if anything you would do with translated content. *However, to get things started, I'd like to ask permission to fill out the [Crowdin Open Source Project Setup Request ](https://crowdin.com/page/open-source-project-setup-request) form on your behalf, to allow me to add a project to the Scientific Python Crowdin organization for Scikit-Learn.* 

For those interested. Here are the specifics of what I'd do with this.

- Create a GitHub repository which mirrors the content from the Scikit-Learn brochure website.
- Setup a cron github action which polls for updates to the Scikit-Learn website content and helps keep the mirror up to date.
- Sync this repository to the Scikit-Learn Crowdin project. Translate can then translate the content, and Crowdin will automatically push commits to a PR against the repository mirroring the website content.

The end product will be a repository with parallel versions of the website content in a variety of languages which is kept up to date. If you want to host the translations on your webpage like NumPy does, myself and/or a colleague from Quansight would be supported by the grant to help make that happen.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

COMMENT:
> I wonder how much the translations from crowdin is going to be better than a auto google translate button on our website.

I think this is a good question to ask. For lolz I asked my browser (Firefox) to translate scikit-learn.org to German for me.

<img width="1280" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-29 at 10 42 05" src="https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/assets/1448859/ab522161-81a3-4054-89cf-37e3fc292d98">

You can tell it is machine translated and as a result somewhat amusing to read if you are a native speaker of both languages.

I think it makes sense to ask some questions and discuss some of the details of how to get the translations back into the website before setting out on the translation effort. This is not just "community projects being slow and slowing things down with endless discussions". For me it is a counter balance to my first impression of this effort which is "someone somewhere applied for some grant to have someone else do something for someone on the internet", which makes me worry that we are driving full throttle in some random direction.

Having a first/rough idea of how the changes are going to (continuously) get integrated back into https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn.github.io/tree/main and what structure we will have there and how much knock on work that will cause seems reasonable before using up people's time translating things.

Creating high quality translations of highly refined wording (as found on landing pages and such) is seriously hard work. In my experience it requires someone who is a native speaker of the target language and nearly a native speaker in the source language. Otherwise you end up with poor/comical translations of idioms and phrases.

Especially given that the zero effort alternative of "let people use AI to translate it to their language" is not all that terrible (it creates comical translations for phrases/idioms but that is kind of expected)

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I'm not against creating an account, but I think it is worth having a bit more of a coherent plan instead of salami slicing the asks so that each one is easy to agree to.

Labels: Needs Decision