For anyone interested in multilingual Discourse sites, I wanted to share info about a product that I recently was able to integrate with my hosted site. I’m not associated with this company in any way other than as a customer and I get no compensation. I just am impressed with this tech and want to share it because translation is so hard and this makes it so easy!
The product is called Linguise. You can see how it gets set up to work with Discourse (or similar tech) in this video.
Basically, you create an account (free for 30 days) and it guides you through setting up some DNS CNAMEs for the main domain of your site that include a 2-letter language prefix. For example, fr.mysite.com, es.mysite.com–one for each language you want to make available.
They then give you a customized element that you need to include on the Discourse site. The easiest way to do this is to create a new theme component, then place their script command in the <Head> section.
That is all it takes. A language switcher now appears on your site (you can adjust its placement and other characteristics easily).
Click on that switcher and choose another language and the page will refresh. You’ll see most screen elements get blurred for a second or two, then the entire page will be machine-translated.
That includes menus, headings, category names, post names, post content, etc. Even the admin and settings screens get translated.
It is amazing. You have 85 languages to choose from, and pricing is based on how many words get translated-it doesn’t care which languages are used. It starts around $15 per month and maxes out at $45 per month for unlimited usage.
This tech also works on nearly any site. They directly support Wordpress, Joomla, Squarespace, Wix, Drupal and many E-commerce sites, etc. But the way this works for Discourse is a kind of general mechanism that can translate any site–even ones you don’t have source code or back-end access to, so long as you have a way to include that one tag.
