Promote support of multi-language recovery phrases

[GBKS]

Recovery phrases are usually in English, which does not work well for people not proficient in the language. Wallets should support multiple languages during wallet generation and import. This should make it easier for people around the world to adopt and protect their bitcoin, fitting our tagline of "Design bitcoin for everyone".

BIP39 includes word lists in 10 languages, and there's a separate repo to collaborate around creating more. Not much activity there at the moment.

One of the problems right now is that there's little support, so if a user generates a wallet in another language, they may not be able to recover it in any other software. So first step would be to work with different wallet teams to support multi-language import. Then, once there is decent support for this, we can promote wallet creation in multiple languages.

This effort evolved from this issue.

We can also consider updating the Manual backup and Wallet recovery pages with relevant info.

Wallets working on this:

• Phoenix (working on implementation)
• BlueWallet (implemented, not released)

Issues filed for:

• Samourai
• Blockstream Green
• Specter

What are some other wallets to talk to about implementing this?

[Bosch-0]

I will expand this list as I make issues, feel free to copy + paste my message and use it with other wallets.

• Add support for importing non-english recovery phrases Samourai-Wallet/samourai-wallet-android#447
• Add support for importing non-english recovery phrases Blockstream/green_ios#42

[GBKS]

Looks like Specter currently supports English, Spanish, and Italian. I added an issue to expand this.

[GBKS]

olawalethefirst created a mnemonic translator to easily convert recovery phrases from one language to another. This could be helpful in reducing the chicken-and-egg problem.

[GBKS]

Afromnemonics is another project from bolt.fun that is creating a wordlist in Swahili.

[GBKS]

Phoenix just merged support for importing seed phrases in 3 extra languages (spanish, french, czech). Cool to see progress on this.