I’ve been visiting the site quite often but haven’t found a need to post anything until today. As the new admin of a forum using the Discourse platform, I’m reaching out for some assistance regarding a request from our members.
Several users have expressed interest in having the ability to translate posts and replies directly within the forum. While Google Chrome allows for text translation by highlighting and right-clicking, many of our members use mobile devices or other browsers that lack this functionality.
Is there a way to implement a translation service within Discourse? Ideally, this would allow users to either highlight a portion of a post or reply, or click a “Translate” button to translate text from English to French (and potentially other languages).
Any guidance or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
I did see this topic while searching the site and probably should have mentioned it in my original post.
The biggest issue I see with this is that many translation services require some sort of payment plan, and I don’t have the ability to pay for this service. It seems like LibreTranslate is the only “free” option listed.
I’m still really new to the admin side of things, and the GitHub page for LibreTranslate doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Regarding Discourse AI, the members of my forum are generally older, and I’m not sure they would accept or understand the use of AI. However, I will bring it up with them.
I guess my question boils down to: “Is there an easier way to do this?”
Easier? No. Better than AI? No. All we are missing is easy to use UI for AI translations. AI helper is okey for a word or very short piece of text and even then there must be knowledge and will to use it. Sometimes it is enough to translate to langueage of that forum, but quite often needs are different.
When you are reading posts, the helper offers translation to the interface language you set in your preferences, so users can decide which language is offered.
@NoseBuzz If on chrome, you can right click on the page and select ‘Translate page to English’. The whole page is then translated using Google Translate
I think that is going to have to be the solution I provide to the members. The people that pay the bills won’t be upgrading their discourse plan so we don’t have access to the AI or Translation at this time.
