There are a number of different ways to structure your site for a multilingual community.
If you have additional examples, please share them below.
“Other languages” category with sub-categories for specific languages
- CodeCombat - Other Languages - CodeCombat Discourse
Alongside your ordinary categories, make one category for “Other Languages”. Add one sub-category for every other language you want to cater to.
Pros
- Clean separation between languages
- Can potentially use category-restricted tags as a 3rd level of categorisation, creating localised tags like “Artesano” (“Artisan”) that mimic the top level categories.
Cons
- Multilingual speakers need to keep track of two of more categories with identical content (as far as they’re concerned)
Forum-wide language tags
- Poppy Project - Poppy Forum
- FairPhone* - Fairphone Community Forum
Combined with emojis.
Create a global tag for each language you’d like to support on your forum. Encourage users to tag their posts with the language they’re using.
Pros
- No need for an extra set of categories
- Multilingual speakers don’t need to keep up with multiple categories for the same type of topics.
Cons
- Tags are hard to enforce. There’s no guarantee that when you’re browsing the
French
tag you’re actually seeing all French-speaking topics.