Many members on these forums have expressed the desire for better accommodation of non-English speakers. Last year, @Jumhyn posted a request/suggestion of adding a translator plugin to the forums. Some of the feedback was that translation services from Google, Bing, DeepL etc. were not good enough to understand the nuances of each different language.
Instead of translating full posts, can we have a translation system for all the technical terms such as "inheritance" and "method"? It seems to me that the terms should have good on-to-one mappings vocabulary-wise between different languages. I imagine a system that automatically underlines a technical term with dotted lines in each post, and when the underlined term is hovered over, produces a little floating box that shows the translation and maybe a short explanation too.
I don't know how much effort it would take to implement such a feature, but I believe it is at least possible through the Topic Tooltips plugin. (Note: Right after posting this, I realised that Topic Tooltips plugin is only for topics. There would need to be something similar to it, but for words.) There are also some existing work by the community that can be built upon for it. For example, the officially recommended Chinese translation for the Swift Programming Language already has a translation table for technical terms. Additionally, building a good database of technical term translations can help with other translation projects in the future, such as diagnostics localisation.
My reasons (or maybe inspiration) for wanting this feature:
My native language is Mandarin, but I received my university education in English, so everything I know of computer science is in English only. I've noticed that technical terms are the most difficult whenever I tried to communicate with other programmers in Mandarin. And I assume that for many who studied computer science not in English, even if they can read/write in English perfectly, it's difficult to find/understand the terms in English when reading/writing on these forums.