Full multilingual documentation: French and Spanish translations

[peetmate]

Motivation

The toolkit targets agroecological research communities where English is often not the working language — notably the CRFS communities of practice in the high Andes (Spanish) and West Africa (French). Full French and Spanish translations would materially widen who can use it.

Scope

Translate user-facing documentation into French (fr) and Spanish (es):

• Documentation site (all pages: home, getting started, datasets, workflow guides, API overview pages)
• README (or a trimmed translated landing README linking to the translated site)
• examples/basic_usage.py walkthrough comments/docstring (translated copies, e.g. examples/basic_usage_fr.py / _es.py, or move the tutorial to translated docs pages)
• Error/help text audit: decide whether CLI --help output and key user-facing error messages are in scope (larger lift — could be a follow-up issue)

Out of scope (for now): translating NumPy docstrings served through help() — mkdocstrings renders from source and dual-language docstrings are hard to maintain. The translated site prose should carry that weight instead.

Suggested approach

1. Add mkdocs-static-i18n to the docs build — file-suffix convention (index.fr.md, index.es.md) keeps translations alongside sources; Material theme has built-in language switcher support.
2. Machine-translate first pass, then native-speaker review before publishing (Alliance/AIMS partners may be able to review).
3. Add a docs-CI check that flags translated pages that lag their English source (compare mtimes or a manifest).

Acceptance criteria

• Language switcher on the docs site with complete fr + es page sets
• No untranslated English strings in nav/labels for fr/es locales
• Review sign-off from at least one native speaker per language

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