I had a question about localized content - is there any possibility or plan to include the localized title and content of topics in the Discourse search, based on a user’s locale ?
You mean here ?
That’s technically doable, yes.
But given that our default search doesn’t work when searching using the non-default locale I think this may be not what we want to work right now.
Can you share more about your use case?
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It’s indeed this search which I was asking about.
It was mainly due to the fact that previously, our forum used the Multi-lingual plugin, which is no longer supported as of writing, which allowed to filter topics by languages, and search either languages since our topics were written twice, in two languages (french and german), offering an equivalant experience for both languages - as such, searching directly the translated content would have been beneficial for us to replicate the experience.
However, since you meet issues with the search as it is currently, I understand how it might not be high on the features list.
The ability to localize specific topics in several languages is already a big plus and a welcomed addition !
As an additionnal question, have you got any plans to search/filter topics by topic language ?
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When you mean “filter” do you mean using https://meta.discourse.org/filter? And “topic language” do you mean original written language by the author?
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When you mean “filter” do you mean using https://meta.discourse.org/filter? And “topic language” do you mean original written language by the author?
I was more thinking the ability to filter which topics are visible while browsing the forum.
For instance, on our forum ( https://forum.commown.coop ) with the Multilingual plugin activated, once logged in, you could set Content languages in your Profile → Interface options to which options you wished to display.
I wasn’t aware of the /filter page - if it were possible to filter topics based on the set topic locale field, this could be a nice alternative c:
By “topic language”, I meant the locale field on posts :
Edit:
- I precised that the topic filter is a feature from the Multilingual plugin
- As a precision, the Multilingual plugin uses tags, by considering locale tags (
fr,de,en) as a seperate field, then probably filters topics with the given tag (I haven’t looked at the filtering code in detail)
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I feel like there needs to be fundamental change in mindset when moving from Multilingual to the new Content Localization feature in Discourse Core (+ AI) –
In multilingual days you have topics that certain users can’t read because it is only written in one language, but with the new content localization users can read any topics that the site is set up to translate to. A single topic is now available in X many languages.
Do you still think the filter is necessary?
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For our purposes, we maintain and translate a database of articles about several technical procedures in two different languages, because our service serves two different languages.
Currently, our german users can directly look up german articles, and our french users can look up the french articles.
If they wished to only display articles in certain languages, then they can create an account and set a Content languages option.
However, if we were to fuse the current german articles into the french ones, then german users wouldn’t be able to search the information they require, because while a singular post can be translated in any languages, you can’t lookup this topic if you don’t know the original title, leading to a worse experience than our forum currently offers.
For instance, I can’t find this topic using the localized french title - so, were I to only speak french, I wouldn’t be able to find it.
As explained by falco in the first answer, this is not a feature planned in the short term, and I understand why.
However, having the ability to filter/hide topics based on post locale would allow a good search/browsing experience for multilingual forums still.
Thank you still for the addition of post localization, both manual and automatic, as a feature and for your continued work on the Discourse software 
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I understand now, it seems this (search) is indeed a gap in our content localization experience now.
I’ll see if it’s possible to quickly add a /filter on original topic locale. Oh yes it is:
EDIT: This is a topic filter, so it’s specific to the topic and not posts within it.
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Oh, that would be a welcomed feature ! I admit I hadn’t looked if any PRs about filtering locales were already on the Discourse git
Thank you for the timely responses and dev!
This is an angle we are currently working on by leveraging AI and embeddings to enable multilingual search. I guess there are some logical follow ups here:
- Show localized topics/posts in search results
- Auto-show AI search results when full page search brings zero results
- Auto append AI search results when quick search brings few results
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