Thank you for creating this thread, I was about to create a similar one now. As i had a bit of experience in working in multi language communities (active for sure), here are my remarks
From a user perspective
- Browse one language at a time.
- Ability to switch easily between languages, some are bilingual and usually English is global.
- Having different categories
From an admin perspective
- Run one platform rather than running one for each community
- ability to customize each language sub-forum (let’s say we have banners in the homepage) It’d be great to make it depend on your language.
add to that cons, too much work that has to be repeated if you need to synchronize these servers
Users database could be linked, but I’m not sure if it’s fully synchronized. Which matters for loyalty levels and so.
[quote=“mikedyang, post:1, topic:34664”]
3. Make a tag for every languagePros- Language communities interact.- Multi-language speaking users can add more value and volunteer translating.- Categories are preserved in every language.
Cons- Users see posts in languages that they don’t speak.
[/quote] That’s messy as you said, especially if you have an active community in each language.
Almost perfect, but still other languages show in recent/latest/new and so. My ideal solution is a bit similar.
I’ve thought for a long time, how could we solve this using Discourse. Running one community is way easier for managers and for users who can use different languages. The tools currently available in Discourse are great to support it and needs some tweaks to make it work.
So my solution would be the following:
- Creating all languages in the same level, let’s say Cat1(EN), Cat1(ES), Cat1(DE), Cat2(EN) and so on.
- Create custom user fields, make this field “Language”.
- Automatically create a group for people with this custom field (English, Spanish and Deutsche)
- These categories will be shown only to users with these custom fields. News(EN) for those who chose English, etc.
- Users can change this at anytime to switch between languages. It could be integrated in the UI to make it even easier.
- Another thing is the interface language, instead of making it a default for the site. It could be adjusted according to these groups.
- Could have yoursitename.com\en as a permalink to show you English categories etc.
What’s different about this solution?
- You keep your two levels of categorization.
- Users won’t be distracted with other regions/languages content in latest/new
- One site and one back-end
What kind of development needed to make this work?
- Make a unique custom fields for languages
- detect this custom field and take action based on it
- Categories to be shown to certain groups only
- Based on this custom fields also, it’ll automatically change the Interface language to that language, but users can change it if they wanted to.