Best set up for multilingual forums?

#1

I’m trialling a English language forum - and if successful, I’d like to roll that out to more languages. My company has some 30+ domains (eg mysite.com, mysite.fr, mysite.es etc etc) each of which are localised to that country.

What would be the best way of having a forum for each of these countries?

From reading here on meta - it looks like we’d have to set up a different instance for each country (eg forum.mysite.com, forum.mysite.fr etc).

Is there any provision for a ‘parent’ account, where we could control some of the main settings, so that we could make global changes, but were still able to localise at country level?

Or are there any other suggestions of how best to structure this?

thanks

PS: we would want each country to be using the forum on their own locale (eg a French user should see the forum on a .fr site).

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#2

Do you think all 40 countries will actually have activity? It might be better to start with the “largest” markets and figure it out as you go. Having to launch 40 sites, or 40 categories, will be a very complex undertaking. Starting smaller might help.

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#3

Strongly agree with @codinghorror I think it is best to pilot the program in 2 locales for 1 month or so and then expand.

Hosting wise at Enterprise level we can offer multisite configuration so you are heavily discounted for multi instances. In a multi instance setup we can control some site settings that cut across all sites.

Keep in mind, Discourse is not localized to 40 languages, so you may have to add in some translation work.

#4

Hi @codinghorror and @sam - thanks for getting back to me.

Totally agree. We’re all about lean, agile and MVP (etc) here so we would indeed only launch one market at a time, see how it goes, and then only expand if sucessul. That next market would be French.

However - even launching one additional language means I need to think about the best way of structuring this now, and how it might look if we did roll out in more. (In reality we’d likely roll out in about 10 max - but that would be some way off.)

@sam - the multisite config sounds like a good way to go.

One more question: we would like to have a single forum for English language, but ideally, if a user is visiting the forum from our US site (.com) they would be directed to forum.mysite.com, whereas if they were visiting from Australia (for example) they would be directed to forum.mysite.com.au. So same content - different domain.

Any thoughts on how that could be achieved?

PS - loving your work so far. This is definitely the best forum software I’ve experienced.

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#5

So sorry for the delay I missed this one…

I would strongly recommend against duplicating content on 2 different domains, Google is going to get very upset and will not know which of the two sites to forward search results to (unless only the US site is canonical), technically this is doable in an Enterprise setup with some customization, it is just something we would strongly recommend against doing.

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#6
#7

See also

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