Seeking experience: Supporting a multilingual Discourse community

Community Building
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We have a small, private (members-only) Discourse forum that has been growing steadily — roughly 3,000 members, ~200 active — over about 10 years, with a handful of international members. We started out self-hosted and have been on CDCK’s managed service for the past four years.

The forum has always been English-only, but we’ve recently received a request to extend full support for Spanish, French, and Portuguese from a related organization. None of our current admin or leadership team has experience running a multilingual community, so we’re in new territory.

Browsing the documentation, I’m genuinely impressed by what discourse-translator appears to offer. That said, our community has used various machine translation services — Google Translate, Zoom’s live captions, and others — for both real-time meetings and written communication, and the consistent feedback has been that the quality falls short enough that people end up doing translations by hand. So I want to go in with realistic expectations.

We’re excited about the possibility of offering this, but before we launch any kind of experiment, I’d love to hear from people who have already been through it and are successfully running a multilingual forum.

Specifically, I’m curious about:

  1. How long have you been supporting a multilingual environment?

  2. How did you roll it out? Did you start with specific groups or categories, or open it up to the whole community at once?

  3. Native-language moderation: Did you need admins or moderators who could work in the supported languages, or was message-level translation sufficient?

  4. Resource limits: Have you ever run out of translation credits? If so, how did you handle it?

  5. Front-end considerations: We have a public WordPress site as the front end to our Discourse community. If you have a non-Discourse front end, did you need to address translation there as well?

  6. Any other advice on how to approach this thoughtfully is very welcome.

Feel free to reply here or send me a Personal Message — happy to share more specifics about our setup and our concerns.

Thanks in advance!

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Have you taken a look at Content Localization - Manual and Automatic with Discourse AI?

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Yes. Looks almost too good…