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Multiple languages on a single forum site?

Fri, 11/16/2007 - 02:45 — Chriswaterguy

A post at Wikitravel Extra on Multilingual strategy makes the suggestion to:

 'have one instance one site for all languages but each user sees the navigational text in their own language (either using content negotiation, like http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec12.html, or with a preference setting), and contributes in whichever language they prefer. Readers could filter languages that they want to see content written in; I could say, "I want to see blog posts in English and French, but not any other language." '

This sounds like a good strategy, if it can be made to work for the forum and blogs part of the site. For the wiki site, I notice that Wikitravel has each language separately, and I think this makes sense for a wiki. In a forum, a page consists of a collation of content by various people (links to various posts) so being able to choose which languages make up the collation you see makes sense - and keeping other languages out of site is no problem. In a wiki, there are a few problems with putting languages together, including language independent page names (like Hexayurt, or Uruguay) needing to be given different names, and statistics for each language being much harder to obtain.

Thoughts?

Chris

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