Implement server-side rendered (SSR)

[patcon]

Original Title: Allow website to be translated by Google Translate

When sharing vTaiwan efforts with English-only speakers, I often wish to share the expereience I have when viewing vTaiwan.tw in Google Chrome, then right-clicking and selecting "Translate to English". The site looks wonderful and moderately legible when I do this. However, that is an extra step to explain to some (and doesn't fit well in a tweet).

I would much rather share this style of link:
https://translate.google.com/translate?u=https://vtaiwan.tw/topic/airbnb/

But as you can see, that doesn't work. (It does work fairly well for SayIt and Hackpad's /ep/pad/static urls, but sharing those gives a much less coherent impression of vTaiwan to those for whom this link might be the first impression :)

I would love to see these pages work more smoothly with translation services, if at all possible! Thanks!

[ValerieKenyon]

Hi, I recently learned about vTaiwan and I'm interested in contributing if possible. I've been studying Chinese on my own for about 2 years, and I'm involved with a civic tech group in Massachusetts. I've gone through the vTaiwan README word-by-word for my own understanding of it, and I could probably provide an English translation if you all think that would be useful. I know some JavaScript and recently started learning VueJS for the purpose of contributing to this project - but I don't want to make extra work for any of you. Please let me know if I can be of help, and in what capacity.

[patcon]

Hi! You should join the g0v slack team and drop into the #vtaiwan channel: https://join.g0v.tw

(Folks usually try to keep GitHub issues on topic, so that's a much better place for freeform discussion, plus more ppl are active there :)

[ValerieKenyon]

Thank you!

[jokeum]

@patcon
Hi, sorry for the very late reply...
The reason why auto translation didn't works probably is dynamic loading of Vue's SPA.
For a better way regarding SEO & auto translation, SSR or prerendering SPA should solve the problem.
I'm not actively developing this project now but have heard a team in vTaiwan channel trying to rewrite this?

@ValerieKenyon
Thanks for the help!
We didn't support i18n capability in the begining so many words are hardcoded, and some content of the topics are dynamically fetch from Discourse API.
I havn't think of an easy way to achieve this... But any thoughts are welcome!

[patcon]

Thanks so much for the reply @jokeum, and no worries on delay :) life gets busy sometimes! Very grateful for your sharing that context -- I'm always curious about these sorts of emerging decisions happening in the background haha

[ValerieKenyon]

@jokeum and @patcon I would be interested in translating some of the hard-coded content into English.

[patcon]

Hey @ValerieKenyon, I think what you're requesting is actually a related but separate issue. I've updated the title of this issue to reflect @jokeum's shared details.

I've also created another issue for the sort of translation you're talking about, which seems to require some more discussion and feature-implementation before translations can be accepted :)

[ValerieKenyon]

Thank you @patcon