Seems we have some very similar ideas on this, especially after the advent of tags. I wrote this in a separate topic but I might as well close that and repost it here for continuity.
Continuing the discussion from Early preview of the new tagging plugin:
I just had a thought. What if a (special) tag could be set as a site-wide filter, invisible as anything other than a setting. The setting being your standard language selection menu in a corner somewhere:
Here’s how you would use tags on a multi-lingual site
Imagine a website with two languages: English and French.
The site’s default language is English. As a result, by default, all new topics are tagged lang:en, and you can only see topics tagged lang:en. This isn’t a tag you can find and select from the taglist yourself.
If you change the site language to French however, two things happen:
- Any new topic you make while the French language setting is turned on will be tagged with
lang:fr. - You will only be able to see topics tagged
lang:fr
Note: This is dependent on tags being possible to use in conjunction with categories as an added filter as opposed to the one-or-the-other situation we have right now.
That’s it. No need to make new categories for each new language, e.g. like on forum.topeleven.com. (provided category names can be translated).
I think this could be a very powerful complement to the existing work that came out of the “Multiple languages on single discourse site” debate.