We have not had the time to dedicate to translating the user guide to Norwegian yet, but as we are also now going to need Swedish (and later Danish/Finnish) I have been looking at potential solutions other than discourse for our needs in Scandinavia, with a preference toward enabling other instances to opt in as well.
I really enjoy the user guide as it is, and find the user friendliness to be of great importance. @sstead gave me access to the wordpress site, and I notice that Avada is the theme being used.
Avada 5.0 recently came out, and I personally love it (but agree that it is not the most user friendly solution for the back-end, nor easy to hand off). But I looked into whether or not there are options for translating from there that would make for an easy way of managing one global version for those instances that do not want to start from scratch with a discourse version.
There seem to be some options available to manage the user guide using WP, including the transifex option that @elf-pavlik mentioned above, as well as the polylang option that @sstead mentioned.
another one is:
Avada is both polylang and wpml compatible.
We could choose to only translate the user guide pages or we could move the user guide as a standalone in its own wordpress.org install, a import/export of the user guide pages should manage that without too much trouble. It can easily be linked to from the current wordpress site and embedded so that it is virtually seamless on the front end for the .org site.
By having it as its own standalone installation, we do not risk messing up any other work on the WP site, we can track the changes and modify when needed. Each instance can link to their version of the user guide, and new instances can come on board as they wish.
We can open up to allowing comments on the pages for feedback and discussion or even include the avada ‘forum’ for a discourse style discussion all integrated into one (with or without social login). The forums can also have child forums.
I have only just grazed the surface on this, and I know that it is a lot of work, but if there is anyone else interested in going down this route, maybe we can find a solution that works well for everyone.