Advice for bilingual communities

community
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First, thanks for creating Discourse. It’s absolutely awesome. I love it. It’s a blaze to install and a bliss to use.

I’m creating a PokémonGo (about PKMGO) community and, since I speak two languages, I would love to provide content in both of those languages.

Currently everything is in English, since the public is larger and provided my primary target are hackers and FOSS devs.

After installing and adding some content to the forum I’m still trying to figure how I could manage a bilingual community without confusing users or adding noise. I would like to avoid having to setup a different infrastructure or a forum so I can manage everything in the same place.

I’m not how to handle that situation, so all advice is welcome.

Peace :european_castle:

Ps.: Discourse install link is https://discuss.doom.team

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You have to choose :slightly_smiling:

  1. 2 instances of Discourse , one for each language
  2. do as https://forum.poppy-project.org/ did: tag every topic with english or french and have a custom header that link to each tag
  3. create 2 mother categories : lang1 & lang2 and have them displayed in the front from admin.
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Thanks @Aymane_Shuichi that’s a lot of useful advices.
I’ll have to think about it seriously. Not sure what I’ll do yet.

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It all depends, If you can manage 2 communities in the same time, go for option 1.
But I do recommend to start with only 1 language and when you see the need of a separate forum, go for option 1.

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I also have this same issue. I’m going to start a community with English mainly, and other languages for local markets. (Working from HQ here). There are different approaches, same as what @Aymane_Shuichi just suggested.

1- Doing 2 instances is not the suitable option IMHO. Since the readers might use both, it’s better to keep them together. There is another method which is setting up two communities, and let both use the same SSO. Also complicated.
Option 2: Personally, I don’t recommend using this method. I find it noisy a bit, since the content is once in English and in another in another language.

I talked to Discourse staff before and they said WD method is also an option, which is creating a category for each language like this https://community.wd.com/ I find this one is the most suitable using Discourse, without too much complications. The only drawback from my opinion, is that you lost 1 level of categorization.

Edit: I found another drawback to WD method, when you browse latest/top/new in the main forums (English in this example) Localized content shows up. I hope that there could be a way to stop it from showing in the main forums, as it would make the users experience a bit messy.

So far, I’m planning to take WD route.

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Definitely be aware of @tgxworld’s translation plugin, which strikes me as a must-have for a bilingual forum.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: How to structure a multilingual community

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Recommended practice is documented here: