Would it be possible for GWM to be multilingual in the future?

I have always thought that GWM could be a global reference site if it were opened to other languages. Currently GWM has no competition in the strict sense. There is no other page like this, so I think the main barrier of entry is the language.

For example, my mother tongue is Spanish. I understand some English. But it takes me a long time to write a more or less correct text, like this one. That forces me to make one word comments or repetitive short phrases. I know it is not mandatory to comment, but there are many people who could not even understand the GWM interface: search = buscar. Spanish is the second language with the most native speakers after Mandarin Chinese, so GWM is losing many thousands of users and visitors. I am not a programmer, but I believe that maintaining a server that houses 600,000 images should not be cheap, so it would be good if GWM were to grow in number of visits.

The language barrier not only limits the number of visitors, it also limits the number of models we have. Here comes the case of Mandarin Chinese perfectly. In GWM we have some Chinese models like Melissa Wee, but most probably there are many others (960000000 of speakers) that we do not know. Keep in mind that in China they do not even use the same social networks as in the West. And supposing some generous Chinese decided to upload photos from a social network to GWM, he would have to know how to translate the name of the girl from the Chinese alphabet into English. This alphabetical problem also occurs with the Spanish, in fact the names “Maria” are badly written, in fact it is “María”, with “í”.

I am aware that implementing several different languages would be a challenge. First it would be necessary to translate the entire interface, create a system to automatically translate names to the alphabet with Roman characters, a system to isolate comments according to their language, and perhaps the most difficult, get moderators to control those comments.

Even so, I think GWM would gain a lot if it were multilanguage. You could start with Spanish. It has the same Roman alphabet (except for small differences: ñ, á, é, í, ó, ú) and there are users that already  speak Spanish. Nor am I asking for the site to appear in any language. I think that with Spanish and Chinese Mandarin would be enough, and maybe Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian.

A few thoughts:

A fairly large portion of the site visitors are already non-English-speaking as is. US/UK/Canada together make up only about half of the site visitors, and the remainder are mostly from non-English speaking countries. This is to be expected, as the site consists mostly of pictures and English knowledge is necessary for minimal navigation only. That said, you're right, there is room for improvement in making the site more international friendly. This would come mostly in the form of translating the various built-in site texts (like the links below the banner) into other languages.

The flip side of the coin is this: while visits from countries like China and India (2% and 1% of the site visitors, respectively) are low relative to their populations, I'm not sure why exactly this is. Is it because the site isn't in those languages? Or is it because there isn't much of an interest in muscular women in those cultures? If it's the latter, then internationalizing the site would be a lot of work for not much benefit. Also, whenever we put up ads that pay on a cost-per-click or view basis, views from these countries aren't worth much. So there isn't too much of a financial incentive to get more views from there, either. (The benefit would come mostly in the form of more people interacting with the site: posting and favoriting images.)

There are no plans to allow commenting in any language besides English, as that would decrease the readability of the site for most users.

Various international characters in names like ñ should be input as such under the images in the name field, and in image searches the character should behave identically to the version without accent marks (in this case regular n). When this is not the case, it is a bug; the good news is that we are working on a new version of the site where this will be fixed.

I input Vietnamese names in their correct spellings to the name tags, and tested Chinese names too. They all work correctly.

It is true that female bodybuilding isn't being viewed with a lot of admiration in Asian countries, but the situation is gradually changing, and if we could somehow help the process, being proselytizers of the new aesthetics to that part of the world, that'd be great. Just my general viewpoint, not a suggestion for any particular change.

Interesting. It may be exaggerated to talk about Chinese. But I think Spanish would be a great choice as a second language for GWM. I think a good percentage of the visitors speak Spanish. You could only translate the interface and keep the comments in English. And later, one could consider Portuguese; muscular girls are relatively popular in Brazil. I say "relatively" because, in reality, fans are a minority anywhere in the world with any culture. The stereotype of femininity is what it is.

I've already said this before, but I insist: GWM needs an interface redesign. It is unusable on a smartphone. Also, why did they change the "About"? https://web.archive.org/web/20140731154835/https://www.girlswithmuscle.com/about/

Funny you should mention that, I am currently working on a redesign of the site that will make it more usable for smartphones. I will try to post a preview tomorrow.

I'm not sure what you mean by changing the about page, it looks the same now as it does in the archive link.

I was referring to the "about" text. The previous text made it clear that GWM is a photo site, and that the photos must be public domain. The current one seems an "about" of a patreon for athletes. Also the "bikini models" and "fitness" leaves the door open to any skinny girl, "musclular women" was much better.

The challenge with localisation is trying to make it readable by everyone. For example while allowing the use of Cyrillic or Chinese Ideograms, for example, might be more representative of the name, it suddenly loses meaning to everyone else. Likewise comments threads that are in different languages only end up being readable by a small portion of people. 

Keeping the site unilingual actually keeps it more accessible, since everyone is forced to have one language to communicate in.

I know it can be a pain for people who don’t have a full grasp of English, but consider that is better than having to know another 100+ languages. Adding translation support would also add complexity to a site that is already maintained in spare time.

Any localisation that may be done in the future will be only after comparing the pros and cons of each approach.