Best practice to managing a multi-language community?

[tophee (Christoph)]

@Mytee

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.

I really like this. And I believe it is possible to more or less implement already now if you skip the custom fields (no need, people can just join the groups) and step 3. So my modified suggestion would be:

1. Create groups for each supported language.
2. Create duplicates of each category for every language you want to support. And make them visible/writable only for members of the respective language.
3. Explain to your users that if they join any of these groups, they will be able to see the categories in the respective language.
4. Users can choose which languages they want to see (even multiple at the same time) by joining the respective language groups.
5. Enable “Allow user locale” in the settings to allow users choose the UI language they prefer (regardless of which groups they are in)

The only downside of this solution that I can see is that only the default language categories will be visible to people who are not logged in. In order to see the other ones, they have to log in and join the language group.