I have a suggestion in regards of when you are running a forum with visitors and members from different countries, writing and reading different languages. I have adopted this technique myself in another project hosting tasting notes.

In the profile, add setting to select with language you write posts in default on the forum. Selectable languages are among those Google can translate between. This language setting will also be the default "reading" language.

So when members post topics, the different languages they are writing in are saved together with the posts, PM etc. When another member reads the topics/PM's they are automatically translated to that users default language.

Implementing this would make you have a truly unique product, truly supporting multilingual users.

Web based translations from what I've experienced have always been really poor though.

Web based translations from what I've experienced have always been really poor though.

Unless they could work out some sort of deal with Google, the processing time would also make things excruciatingly slow.

Interesting idea, though.

Well, the translation has some flaws sometimes, but as a concept I think it works good. As an example, take a look at this link: http://wfurl.co/r382,
there you can click the little black "star"-icon below the review to translate the text. And it is done with Google Translate API.