That would require that admins can limit which locale their users can choose. That would also be a solution, but it would prevent communities from benefiting from the increasing number of translations that discourse provides out of the box.
You are fixating on problems specific to you, that is, you believe that customizing text in one language should somehow magically customize the same text in every available human language. I do not share this belief and I feel, very strongly, that you should bear the burden of your own choices with regards to text customization. If you want to customize text in every language, you take responsibility for that work, not us.
Furthermore, I also fail to share your belief that non-customized text is some kind of disaster of epic proportions. Default text is harmless.
My reply was actually based on my understanding of the code when I last changed it. I guess it was a while back 
I very much prefer that we are now consistent across all UI text even though it means more work on admins when they customize some text. I also 
your suggestion.
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No, this is a misunderstanding. I am merely looking for a way to allow users to use existing locales while still allowing site admins to customize texts, especially the discobot welcome message. Currently, you have the choice of either allowing user locales or customizing.
I have said nothing to convey such a belief. However, default text can be a problem under certain circumstances, for example when you have customized the welcome message to provide certain site specific information to new users but then some users nevertheless receive the default welcome message.
Untrue, you can customize in both cases. Just not to your satisfaction.
Simply customize all affected locales, this already works.
Since you cannot exclude any locales, that would be “all locales”, which brings us back to
Why not just customize it in the ~4 most common languages after English? Surely you’re not going to have users speaking American Cherokee Indian anytime soon.
Yes, as I said, limiting the locales that users can choose would also solve the problem, albeit in an unnecessarily limiting way.
What do you think about @tgxworld’s proposal above?
I don’t know about this. A new user wouldn’t have had the chance to select her/his preferred locale before the welcome message is sent out. I’m pretty sure they are most likely going to get your customised message in the default locale of the site.
Unless you have set locale from accept language header turned on
Or if users choose to respond to the bot after they have customized their locale (though that would not concern the welcome message)
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If you’re knees deep into customisations, wouldn’t it be better to just turn off set locale from accept language header ? Even with my proposed fix for your use case, they are going to end up getting the welcome message in the default locale of your site. I don’t feel very strongly about this and like @codinghorror said, customising the welcome message for the 4 next common languages would be good enough.
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Yes, I did that, of course, when I realized the consequences. But I think it’s a really great setting for multi-lingual sites because it immediately sends a message to new users when they first visit the site. In fact, even on mono-lingual sites, people who are not native speakers of the site language might be attracted by having the UI in another language.
Yes, unless their browser locale is in one of the languages for which I customized the message. But that, I think, is fine because on the plus side, what users get is the whole UI in their language. You can’t have it all. And you might even speculate that if that UI brings more people from that language community to my forum, chances are that eventually someone helps translate the welcome message (or whatever else is missing).
Since this would also require a new feature (limiting which locales are available on a site) I guess it’s a matter of cost/benefit calculation. The benefit of limiting user locales would be tangible but rather limited and with negative side effects (but still a viable solution). The benefit of your suggestion would be great and would increase in time as more discourse locales become available. So, in my mind, it is clearly the better solution in terms of benefit and openness for future development.
I have no clue about the cost dimension. Could you add it to the equation?
SInce this topic has been somewhat inconclusive I’d like to return to what I think was an excellent suggestion:
This would be immensely helpful and as far as I can tell (which is not very far) it’s probably a rather easy thing to accomplish. Any chance that this could get implemented?
Just to reiterate why this is useful, since the discussion above is somewhat complex: basically, it solves the problem that once you customize any text element in your site’s default language, you can no longer allow users to choose their own locale (let alone enable set locale from accept language header) because they will be seeing the default texts in their respective language and those will no longer correspond to the texts in the site’s main language.
I should add one important detail to the proposed solution:
if you customize a translation of the default site locale, all the other locales should treat its corresponding translation text as missing unless the translation text has also been customized
In other words: if my site is in English and I customized a specific text in English but also in French, all locales will fall back to the default locale for that specific text except for the French locale, (because it has also been customized so that a correspondence between the translations can be assumed).
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Any news on this? I’d love to know if this is planned in any way:
If it’s not planned, could someone give an indication of what kind of work would be required to implement this?
To me it looks like what is needed is an routine that is activated whenever a page is served in a language other than the site’s default language. That routine would check if any of the text elements on that page have been modified in the default locale. If not, exit. If yes, it checks if they have also been modified in the current language. If yes, exit. If no, serve the text in the default language.
Alternatively, instead of checking things every time a “foreign” page is served, all current procedures could be left unchanged and instead changes are made whenever default texts are customized. For example, whenever a default text is modified in the default language, all default copies of all other languages are deleted so that the default text will be served (or will it?)
That latter option has quite some pitfalls though, because you need to make sure that only default copies are deleted, not modified ones. And what happens if the default translation is updated on transifex? That should not lead to the copy magically reappearing when the discourse instance is upgraded.
So the first option is probably the better one, but I have no idea how much extra resource use it would imply for serving pages in a foreign language…
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@tophee Did you find a solution to this? I’m currently looking at how to restrict the locale list. If there is no solution yet, I will look to implement on… Thanks in advance for your feedback
The solution is here:
But I don’t think it has been implemented yet.
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I suppose @tgxworld’s fix is low priority? Or is it on the roadmap at all?
I don’t think I’m able to implement this myself but I’m thinking of maybe trying a kind of brute-force solution by simply deleting (or making unaccessible) all locales that I don’t want to customize (and hence want to prevent people from using).
Could someone give me a hint as to how to gi about tbis? I’m guessing that I need a rather simple plugin that “breaks” the unwanted locales?
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@tophee Disculpa por revivir un tema antiguo, pero he estado trabajando mucho recientemente en el soporte multilingüe, así que tengo curiosidad por entender un poco más de qué estás hablando aquí.
Confieso que estoy un poco confundido sobre por qué tu solución propuesta ofrece una mejor experiencia de usuario que simplemente traducir el texto personalizado a los diferentes idiomas de tus usuarios.
Pienso que sería una experiencia extraña para un usuario en un foro multilingüe ver algunos mensajes automatizados en el idioma predeterminado del foro y otros en su propio idioma. Pero quizás estoy malinterpretando tu punto.
En cualquier caso, ahora puedes restringir la cantidad de idiomas de interfaz disponibles utilizando Multilingual Plugin 🌐.
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¡Vaya, eso se ve fantástico! Lo revisaré con más detalle lo antes posible.
En un mundo perfecto, sin restricciones de recursos, por supuesto que sería mejor traducir todo. Pero el problema que se intentaba resolver es que básicamente tienes que traducir todo el texto personalizado a todos los idiomas (ya que no es posible restringir qué idiomas están disponibles para los usuarios). Si tu plugin ahora resuelve eso, sería un gran avance, como se mencionó anteriormente:
Para aclarar lo que quiero decir con “efectos secundarios negativos”: si Discourse ha sido traducido a 30 (?) idiomas, eso es excelente para los hablantes de esos idiomas, por lo que no permitir que estos usuarios elijan la mayoría de esos idiomas es una desventaja. Dicho de otra manera: para permitir un idioma, debo poder traducir mis textos personalizados a ese idioma.
De ahí mi sugerencia de hacer que, si un texto ha sido personalizado en el idioma predeterminado, todos los demás idiomas recurran al idioma predeterminado al mostrar ese texto (a menos que también tengan una copia personalizada de ese texto).
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Sí, entiendo lo que dices.
Sin embargo, me pregunto si estás poniendo demasiado énfasis en la necesidad de traducir el texto personalizado a todos los idiomas, en lugar de simplemente apuntar a los idiomas más comunes de tus usuarios.
Pongámoslo a prueba. Creo que es más fácil hablar de esto mediante ejemplos.
Imagina que tienes un foro en Bélgica sobre ciclismo 
. El 95% de tus usuarios habla neerlandés 
(40%), francés 
(30%), alemán 
(15%) o inglés 
(10% - turistas). El otro 5% habla una mezcla de otros idiomas. El idioma predeterminado del foro es el neerlandés.
Ahora, digamos que solo personalizamos el texto del bot narrativo en neerlandés, se utiliza la función de “respaldo” y la personalización en neerlandés se muestra a todos los usuarios del foro. Técnicamente, todos verían el mismo texto, pero el 60% de los usuarios del foro podría no entenderlo, o solo parcialmente (además, los hablantes de francés y alemán podrían sentir que es un foro ‘flamenco’).
Por el contrario, digamos que tú (con la ayuda de algunos moderadores o usuarios avanzados que sean hablantes nativos) también traduces el texto de bienvenida personalizado al francés, alemán e inglés, y la función de ‘respaldo’ no está presente. Ahora, el 95% de los usuarios del foro vería el texto personalizado en un idioma que entienden completamente (y con el que se identifican), y el 5% restante vería un texto diferente.
En este tipo de escenario, la función de respaldo podría ser útil para ese 5% de los casos, pero parece que el problema mayor es traducir el texto personalizado a un puñado de idiomas más comúnmente utilizados, en lugar de que una pequeña minoría de usuarios vea un texto diferente.
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