Support for multiple languages

[gpbl]

I've got my experience supporting multiple languages in some isomorphic webapps, also with flux. I also experienced the frustration of moving an existing app to i18n 😆

Supporting multiple languages requires a good coordination between different roles, from copywriters to programmers to translators. Because of this, I believe it is important we start thinking about i18n soon 👍

Development stack

• I've had a mixed experience with react-intl, which is based on the standard Intl API (a long story... 😄 ) It seems they are going to fix many of v1 issues in the upcoming release adding super awesome features.
  It is developed by Yahoo and widely adopted by the community, so I would still use this module. There's even a plugin for babel that helps to extract the strings from the code to pass them to the translators, which is a big plus. If possibile, react-intl would also help us to remove the beautiful yet heavy moment.js module.

• The RTL support shouldn't be an issue with our code, yet it is still to understand if external packages require some hack to work properly in a multi language app. Translating their internal strings and date/time support could be an issue in some of them. (e.g. react-material-ui, the last time I checked it, they didn't support i18n)

• An important feature is to load the locale data only for the users asking that languages. This can be solved by webpack, more or less verbosely

  I also wonder if the fonts listed in fonts.scss are there for i18n reasons. @p0o @mochawich do you know why we include those external fonts?

Working with translators

This is something @mochawich will need to coordinate, e.g. adopt some tools available online. I've not much experience with this kind of tools, I hope you do :) I've seen many talking about this or that service. A requirement could be that they must work even for the mobile clients. The goal is we don't break the app with files coming from "the outside world", and that our users won't be confused by bad translations.

Next steps

Once we have discussed a small roadmap, we can write a checklist of things that we need to do to deliver shout-it in multiple languages ☀️ We should also decide if we need to wait for the mobile apps first.

[nourspace]

For translating services there is: https://www.transifex.com which works well with github. For now however, the main required language is Arabic and I can take care of that. The same way I do for mobile apps. Whenever there is a push with new strings I can translate them directly.

[gpbl]

Waiting for #16 (upgrade to babel 6) and a better app structure (#171).

[nourspace]

I assume this can be closed