## Detailed Plan
This project proposes to build an open source web app that any one can deploy to a server to manage crowd source translation.
## The Web Application will
- provide a user interface so that individuals can sign up as a translator, indicating the languages they are qualified to work with.
- provide an interface for site admins to add new texts and content to be translated.
- let admin choose their supported language
- optionally limit signups to specific non fungible or fungible token ownership.
- provide a way for translations to be drafted by three translation API services (Google's, Microsoft, and Deepl). This will enable translators to start with a machine-learning-powered translation to lighten the work of translation. They can simply edit the machine translation instead of starting from scratch.
To facilitate live publishing of translated files for more technically advance teams, admins will also be able to setup web-hooks to receive translations in real time as they are published.
Note that site owners will have to pay for a subscription to premium translation API services (ie. Google Translate, DeepL), if they wish to leverage that part of the application. These provide good quality translations that can reduce the time and work needed for translation work. Site Admins can also pre-generate all texts needing translation ahead of time in the application back end.
## Deploying the Application
The plan is to provide full Dockerization and a fully functioning docker-compose file so you can spin this up with minimum dependencies. You will be able to add it to any site either as a sub.domain or a /slash endpoint just like the way you might add a forum software like discourse to a website.
## The final product will be delivered as:
-- A UI for translators to translate content
-- A UI for managing translator payment information
-- A translation tracking system for translators to track translations completed
-- A UI for admins
-- A system to pay translators in ADA or any Cardano native tokens
-- A system to optionally generate, mint and deliver milestone NFTs for translators
-- Admin will be able to download translations from the system with support for I18next (for JavaScript sites) and .mo files for WordPress sites and .json file for everything else.
Why another translation system?
While there are many systems including plugins for websites to manage and facilitate translation, they are expensive and often charged per number of translators in the system, resulting in monthly costs of more than hundreds of dollars per month for crowd-sourcing setups. Other systems have fixed costs, with no option for teams to deploy their own native tokens for compensation.
We already have a working prototype to manage translation at lidonation.com (see screenshots). Funding will allow us to extract this system from lidonation and open source it to the community and add features for bigger communities (NFTs milestones, custom token payment support, and extracting in different formats).
## About LIDO Nation
At Lido Nation, our mission is Cardano education, outreach, and global community building: Because the Future is for Everyone!
Our site invites community involvement by providing an interface to submit new content, comment and respond to existing content, record audio versions of articles, and propose new article ideas.
We are building new tools to teach blockchain content and promote humanitarian values, by using "real" Cardano blockchain tokens and transactions to allow community members to direct our charitable giving!
We have 40 articles published, covering a range of Cardano topics. We skip the hype and focus on the real good stuff that is happening in Cardano, with the aim of publishing content that is understandable to newcomers, and educational for everybody.
Because we value reaching as many people as possible with content they can understand, we are translating our content into multiple languages - we were funded for Swahili translation in Fund 6, and for Spanish translation in Fund 7. Those translations are currently rolling out using our translation system on the site and getting great feedback! We also provide audio recordings of all of our content (in all supported languages!) for those who may prefer to learn that way.
## Motivation
We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and small businesses, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and services. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide trusted resources and open source tools to help them learn, get build, and contribute.
## Our Values
We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people, and written by all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility and cross-cultural collaboration:
Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms.
Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources for non developers**.
Facilitate original content creation from across cultures, via collaboration with our Lab in Kenya, and via content contribution channels on our site.
Above all, encourage people to get involved. We are huge fans of Project Catalyst and are excited to grow our capacity as leaders and mentors helping people to onboard into a variety of roles and participation with Project Catalyst.
## How Big is the Market
Every Cardano community, DApp, wallet, dexes all have interest providing interfaces in the native language of their global audience. How big is the market? As big as there are non-English speakers in the blockchain space.
Challenge Metric: increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects
--> Not only is the initial code base being developed by an enterprise software engineer with over 14 of experience, it will be open source from day one for all to contribute. The outputs of this system will help every open source project facilitate and incentivize translations.
Challenge Metric: increase the number of contributors
--> Translations is something many more people can do than build or other technical skills. Having an open source user friendly interface for non technical contributors to contribute to projects building Cardano will increase the number of contributors, in the building of Cardano and many community projects.
Challenge Metric: increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)
--> We will be dog-fooding part of this system on own site. We will get dog-fooding this system to provide QA for translating catalyst proposals into Spanish. There is no user-friendly open source tool for managing and incentivizing translations right now. This will give - for example- communities like catalyst, adao and wallet makers a way to source translations from their communities. As this webapp is not Cardano specific, having ADA and native token information available as as optional incentive structure, this will raise Cardano awareness to communities outside of crypto and blockchain sphere deploying the system.
The output of this is a website (and a Dockerfile). This means communities will need someone technical to deploy it. Since many communities already have at least a webmaster or manager with technical skills on their teams, many should be able to easily deploy it. We will be thinking about ways to lower this barrier. A software as a service (hosted SaaS service) comes to mind but we will be gathering feedback from the community for other ideas. Feel free to leave some in the comments!