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 - 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]

Re-translate edited posts

Currently a translated post is not re-translated when the original is edited. We’re considering some good default thresholds, or exposing certain controls that allow privileged users to trigger automatic translation on the edited post.

Oneboxes and links

They currently do not show up correctly on localized topics. This will be fixed.

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

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The feature to serve translated content has not been implemented yet.

But to address the question properly – our team has had discussions about this before and I honestly don’t think we need to worry about adverse effects. In fact our feature would actually improve international site traffic if we’re talking about Google specifically.

Using Reddit as an example today, let’s say you’re a Spanish reader searching for espresso machines on reddit:

Spanish profile, searching for espresso machines on reddit
Spanish profile, searching for espresso machines on reddit2072×1730 466 KB

Search result for ‘espresso machines reddit’ - see the URL

The first result is a machine-translated post on reddit, its URL being https://www.reddit.com/r/espresso/comments/1fbwbun/most_vfm_entry_espresso_machine/?tl=es-es (note the tl language query parameter). As most reddit users will know, searching for content in their language may now lead to seeing machine translations done by the Google API themselves (Reddit and Google have a huge collab). These folks did some research as well and I trust their content – AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed).

So, Google is taking your original content and machine-translating it themselves, potentially taking traffic away from your site. The blog post from the same folks here (Google Is Stealing Your International Search Traffic With Automated Translations) does a good walkthrough on how this might be happening, and makes the recommendation that you should translate your content yourself. With the localization feature we have, you can start localizing your content (whether through AI or manually), with the added benefit of ensuring your translated topics are at a quality you desire.

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Thanks that’s a good example with Reddit, I did some more research Reddit also seems to use hreflang flags is it planned in this way too?

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Yup, that’s the way it will be.

It won’t be a rapid rollout as we have to do some tests first as well.

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If i want writte my reply with my native lang I could? because a couple months ago I tried and I was warned, translate my content means that my internacional traffic it’s allowed typing in any language right?

Look your example: I still using Reddit even as Lurker and this translate has been translating to me native lang til ours ways to says, example? When I say ‘Hello’ in english here we not says ‘Olá’ but ‘Fala tu’ and Reddit today understand this, you’ve sure that this model will learn translate this way with 7.800 tokens?

For last, any chances to CDCK provide an API paid to translate our communities I did this question in the past but now that apparentely there a team for that i’m here again

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This is so rad!

:skateboard:
:fire:

I was also surprised by this! My background is in public surveying for multilingual constituencies, and it was sometimes a challenge to explain to some stakeholders why the multilingual menu options made sense to readers, rather than English visitors.

It is kind of a wild time for multilingual systems, with LLMs producing reliable results! And I’m looking forward to learning new patterns to apply so we can talk to the most people. :slight_smile:

:exploding_head:

So this is just the Discourse AI plugin?!

I’m going to need to rethink a few things, but I think I can just switch over to Discourse AI translations with minimal fuss. :thinking:

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Yes, that is the case. The whole topic can be written natively in 20 languages and will be served in German to a German reader, if the supported languages include German.

Discourse will not provide recommendations on which model you should use, so you should choose a model which supports translating to the languages of your choise.

Mentioned in docs is also the ability to customize the persona that includes the prompt and model. :backhand_index_pointing_down:t2:

I don’t really understand what you mean here, can you elaborate or share what this question is?

Not sure if this is what you mean, but CDCK will unlikely provide any other paid services, however - A customer on our hosting may set up this feature with the CDCK-hosted models but there are language limits based on which tier they are on.

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I have a forum in Portuguese language. Some time ago, I was thinking about creating another forum in the same niche as the one I currently have, but in french, my second language. But I gave up because it would be too much work to create content for two new forums.

I’m very happy about this announcement and look forward to it being implemented.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: When localized, category dropdown filters in both languages but only works for one

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A post was split to a new topic: Feedback on translating a post to German