# Language switcher and language content

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/language-switcher-and-language-content/380845
**Category:** Site feedback
**Tags:** content-localization
**Created:** [August 29, 2025, 1:37am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/language-switcher-and-language-content/380845 "2025-08-29T01:37:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 13

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### Author: ![nat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/nat/32/235063_2.png) [@nat](https://meta.discourse.org/u/nat)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2025, 4:42am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/language-switcher-and-language-content/380845/13 "2025-08-30T04:42:55Z")

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Great conversation here!

> [@patrickemin](#):
>
> I activated the French interface but my reply to you was not translated

I found out the reason –

 ![composer shows detected language is French](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/5/4/d/54d4ae0ad66b7ef2f0e6c9753de178bd19f6b8de.png)

There is a little quirk with detection for post language, a problem which solution has been eluding me. In the text you wrote in English but it has mentions of French. Depending on which LLM sometimes it would be detected as French or English. (In case you are curious, the prompt looks like [this](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/bb6c5c9fa1793887f6ba3a3489f2ce0d7549a6e9/plugins/discourse-ai/lib/personas/locale_detector.rb#L10-L48)).

When a post is detected to be French, we skip translating to French – the first step of this feature (which is language detection) is very important and can cause confusion downstream if it’s wrong. 😥

> [@patrickemin](#):
>
> In other words, selecting English translates everything in English or leaves the content untranslated ?

As it was designed, if I write in “Indonesian” now (a language not supported on meta), it should still translate to English and all the other languages we support.

The site setting `content_localization_supported_locales` define the languages that any content can be translated _to_.

This is a great question and I’ve incorporated it into our FAQ:

> [@Content Localization - Manual and Automatic with Discourse AI](https://meta.discourse.org/t/content-localization-manual-and-automatic-with-discourse-ai/370969/1):
>
> **If my forum supports English and Japanese (via `Content localization supported locales`), and someone writes in Spanish, will their post be translated?**  
> Yes. All topics and posts will be translated to English and Japanese, regardless of the written language.

> [@patrickemin](#):
>
> does this means I can post content in that other language or should I continue to post in English ?

My personal opinion is to write in what you’re comfortable with 🙂 Turning on this feature on meta allows us to test and improve the feature and prompts.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/language-switcher-and-language-content/380845)._