Home › Forums › Appropedia site development

Multiple languages on a single forum site?

Chriswaterguy's picture
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

‹ Table of contents - move to right by default? Appropedia policies impacted by 501(c)(3) ›

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Add image
  • <ref>, </ref> around notes. <nowiki>, </nowiki> around text not to be formatted.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <sup> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <big> <small> <img> <ref> </ref> <references> <nowiki> </nowiki>
  • Allow MediaWiki syntax (limited).
  • Images can be added to this post.
  • Handle "[[Page]]" (wikis), [http://... link text] (exts)
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • You may use [inline:xx] tags to display uploaded files or images inline.
  • You can use context links in the text to create context-related links to pages or sites that provide additional information about a word or phrase.

More information about formatting options

Captcha
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.