Content Localization and Automatic Translations for Your Community

Announcements
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Meta localized to Japanese
Meta localized to Japanese2654×1866 413 KB

:partying_face:

Content localization and automatic translations are now ready, bringing multilingual support to your communities. This feature is enabled here on Meta.

Our experiments here have drummed up quite a lot of buzz as we’ve been tinkering away, and we are very pleased to say that the anticipation is finally over and you can now have these great new features live on your sites too. :slight_smile: :tada:

With these powerful new additions, you can now translate and serve your site’s content in multiple languages for a seamless multilingual experience. :globe_with_meridians: From topic titles to post content, and even categories and their descriptions, your community can now be fully translated into a variety of languages of your choosing.

For details on the feature and how to set it up, please visit the documentation topic: Content Localization - Manual and Automatic with Discourse AI

:discourse: Hosted by us? This feature is available on all of our hosted plans

FAQ

Which LLM is meta (this forum) using?
We’ve been iterating and have settled with Gemini Flash 2.5 for now; we were just using 2.0 a few weeks ago. Language support and costs will keep evolving and we expect to be updating as-and-when we find better ones. This metric by OpenRouter is useful to determine what is typically used out there - LLM Rankings | OpenRouter.

But … how much does this all cost?
There are many variables to how much translating your community might cost: chosen model, post sizes, number of topics, number of categories. We recommend setting a daily acceptable quota and then vary it as you go. Discourse AI - AI usage and Configuring LLM Usage Quotas in Discourse AI are great topics on monitoring usage.

As a very rough gauge, translating 🇨🇳 Discourse supports Chinese usernames | Discourse 支持中文用户名 to 2 languages (English and Japanese) with the default persona uses 7800 tokens. If using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, it costs $0.001030

Upcoming Features and Improvements

Serving localized content to SEO

We want to help public communities get more organic traffic. If your site defines a set of locales that you support, every topic will also indicate links to its translated version for Search Engines like Google to index.

Locale selectors that make sense to you

Currently sitewide, we have “日本語” for Japanese in the dropdown selector. We should use “Japanese” instead when viewing it in English.

Localizing tags

As-is, tags are not as robust as categories and have some quirks. Tags will fundamentally need some changes prior to adding localization features. [1]

Have a question or suggestion?

If you’ve found an area which hasn’t been localized when it should, or would like to suggest improvements, we are happy to listen and will take your suggestions internally for further discussion.

Please add them to this topic and we will fork them out into new topics if it deserves its own space.

  1. A quick comparison of a category https://meta.discourse.org/c/bug/1 to a tag https://meta.discourse.org/tag/email gives us some hints that tags are not identified by their IDs but the names instead. ↩︎

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I’m curious about the rationale behind this part. If I am a native English reader viewing in English, the language drop-down (typically) has no relevance to me while if my native language is different (still viewing in English), what I think would make sense to me is to see the name of my language in my native script.

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We did have an internal conversation about this – here’s an example on why it might make sense:

Some language pickers include the language in both the localized and original text, e.g.

  • Japanese 日本語
  • Arabic اللغة العربية

So that’s what we’re considering.

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Thanks, the search issue makes a lot of sense and changing those titles is a far less complex and wide reaching change than allowing alternative search terms for the values.

I like the idea of using both English (whatever language I am running in?) and the native script, since it won’t potentially negatively impact native other-language readers.

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When a user flags a post do moderators see in which language the user read it?

So for example if I flagged this post as off topic

would you know that I saw a weird translation and the flag is not related to the original content?

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Currently no, but good point. It could make sense to create a new custom flag to do so. :memo:

EDIT: Done.

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The flag is definitely helpful. But it requires that I compare the original post and the translation I see.
When I don’t do that, an indicator that I was looking at the German version when I flagged as off-topic would still be helpful. Especially in cases where the original isn’t in English, so I cannot tell without research if the translation or the original is the problem.

Does the custom flag affect trust levels? It would be unfair to punish users for mistakes in translations they didn’t write.

Edit:

I tried it right away

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I see, I believe I misinterpreted you. But regardless the flag is there to flag incorrect translations.

I now understand your original intent and that’s a good point as well. Coincidentally, there’s a review queue revamp going on right now - Current Projects - April 2025. I’ll collaborate with that team to see if we can add some metadata to the moderator viewing the flagged post. :ok_hand:t2: As usual, thank you for your sharp observation.

From what I can read, no - agreeing with a custom flag does not penalize the user.

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Thank you very much; this is extremely helpful. Just a quick question: does the translation plugin need to be activated?

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Nope, good question - the translator plugin is not used at all. I would recommend to disable it to prevent confusion.

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@Moin just confirmed with the staff experience team lead that there’s a penalty due to “TL3 requires max flagged”

EDIT: Agreeing with the custom flag doesn’t penalize a user.

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What are the implications for SEO when utilizing this feature? Could it potentially lead to adverse effects?