Organization of a multi-lingual site

We are setting up a multi-lingual site for people with under-recognized diseases.

We have top-level categories for each language, e.g.:

  • EN - English
  • FI - Finnish
  • FR - French

We have to find a way to indicate diseases within each language. Should that be subcategories or tags?

The problem with subcategories is that they all show up in the New topic menu. So all languages x all diseases could be ~50 items. This is overwhelming. The “choose category” menu shows the current category first, which helps.

The other approach is to use tags for diseases. The default design of tags is too subtle (gray text) but it seems those could be styled using CSS.

I’ve been looking at forum.asana.com which is multi-lingual, but it is highly customized so it might not be the best reference.

TLDR: Use categories or tags for diseases, in a multilingual site where the main categories are languages?

Is there a straightforward way to hide certain subcategories from the New Topic form? forum.asana.com has done so (e.g., in the German forum).