I think organizing translations isn't as simple. There needs to be a chain of trust assuring that the translations submitted are actually translations. Otherwise anyone could just submit Lorem Ipsum in some Indic script and ridicule us. :)

How can we leverage the existing structures and processes of the existing community of translators?

My first thought is that we'd might not want to try to leverage that, but build something new. The existing structures are tied to specific types of translations: if you hang out at Translatewiki, it's to translate software. The translators-l translators typically act on occasional requests, people who translate e.g. Meta might translate what they stumble over. When looking at the content of the blog, a lot of this is the kind of material we've not been very successful at translating. By trying to leverage what hasn't been working well for this kind of material in the past, I think we'd be setting us up for disappointment. I wonder if we'd not be better off a) trying to build something new and b) using that as a base for our later work with translators.

A practical question: when an announcement is being posted in, say, a translatable page in Meta and a translatable blog post in Space, how a translations supposed to be handled. It looks like it is going to be a question coming to us pretty soon.

Some feedback from a someone who recently published a multi-lingual post to Space, "I think it could be improved by generating an automated copy of the original article when starting a translation. Maybe I missed an option, but I had to copy-paste the article's text and re-integrate images by hand. It could have been a lot faster if I just had the translation part to do and not re-do the editorial work. "

Polylang Pro allows for this feature. We are currently using plain Polylang.

Another suggestion (adding here so I don't forget)

it would be interesting to insert an option to allow anyone to translate any article. It could be a button at the end or beginning of each article saying "translate this article into your language" (or even an option to "ask for a translation" if someone is interested in the subject but doesn't understand the content).

This is something @hdothiduc and I could discuss from a design perspective and @mcruzWMF and I from an editorial process and documentation perspective.

@CKoerner_WMF: Mass-moving open Space (Oct-Dec-2019) tasks to Space (Jan-Mar-2020). In case this task has been fixed (resolved) already or is not being worked on anymore (declined), please update the task status via the Add Action... → Change Status dropdown. Thanks!