Make a multi-language forum

[tophee (Christoph)]

@resplin Are you still interested in making discourse more suitable for multi-language communities? would the following be a viable option for you?

@tophee

Create groups for each supported language.
Create duplicates of each category for every language you want to support. And make them visible/writable only for members of the respective language.
Explain to your users that if they join any of these groups, they will be able to see the categories in the respective language.
Users can choose which languages they want to see (even multiple at the same time) by joining the respective language groups.
Enable “Allow user locale” in the settings to allow users choose the UI language they prefer (regardless of which groups they are in)

The only downside of this solution that I can see is that only the default language categories will be visible to people who are not logged in. In order to see the other ones, they have to log in and join the language group.

If the downside is a dealbreaker, check out this, which could apparently be done as a simple plugin:

Hide categories from specific groups

This feature may be useful in other scenarios too, but my use case is a multi-lingual site. A key challenge of a multi-lingual forum is how to best configure it to allow the use of different languages while not spamming users with posts in languages they don’t understand. At present, I think the best solution is to use language groups and show categories for each language only to members of the respective language group. Like this: But there is a significant problem with this approach: all co…