The discussion addresses an issue where users on a local Discourse instance cannot search for topics using their translated titles, unlike the behavior observed on Discourse Meta. Honeyxilia explains that while they have manually translated articles between French and German, searching by keywords in the translated title yields no results.
awesomerobot clarifies that translated content is not indexed for standard keyword search, which only matches the original language. The functionality seen on Meta is attributed to AI semantic search (ai_embeddings_semantic_quick_search_enabled), which identifies matches by meaning across languages and displays the title in the user’s selected language. In response, Honeyxilia acknowledges this explanation and expresses interest in potential future options or plugins for indexing translated content.
Hello, we’re hosting a Discourse ( https://forum.commown.coop/ ) instance with manually translated articles between French and German, with French as the default language and German as the supplementary language.
One of the features, which seems to be available on this instance of Discourse, is being able to search an article from the translated title, such as the following exemple underneath, looking up the "Install:
However, on our instance, we cannot replicate the same behavior for translated titled.
For instance, after accessing our forum with German set as the language, and trying to look up this translated article, we cannot search it using the translated title.
Is there some feature we need to tick in order to be able to look up articles in their translated languages (without activating automated translations) ?
Thanks in advance !
Good question and I can see how this would be confusing!
Translated content isn’t indexed for search, so keyword search only matches the original language. What you’re seeing here on Meta is most likely AI semantic search (ai_embeddings_semantic_quick_search_enabled).
When keyword search returns few results semantic search kicks in to add matches by meaning, which works across languages without translating anything. The result then shows the title in your language because we display the translated title in search results.
Indexing translated content would be pretty nifty, even as an option (since it could add more processing load to search it), but in the meantime, we’ll see if a community solution exists, or even if we could implement it as a plugin.
