multilingual forum names

[m3rk0rd]

I have a large percentage of Spanish and Portuguese speakers on my site and I'd like to offer my site in those languages. The language packs in IPB are a great tool for allowing a site to be translated from English to another language, but they leave something to be desired for having a site with contemporaneous multiple languages options.

The biggest problem I am finding is the lack of support for translating forum names and descriptions. This problem can be extrapolated to names of IP.Content databases and categories (inclulding the built-in Articles database).

I would like to suggest that a mechanism be implemented for translating things like forum names. One way would be to accept language strings for forum names. Another way might be to have forum names stored in a language pack. You could set a name for each forum in its forum settings, in the default language, but each time a forum is created a new language string could also be created for that forum. The default behavior would be to grab the forum name as its entered in the settings, but if the user has another language selected, the translated language string could be used instead. I'm just throwing out some ideas here.

Is anybody else out there looking for true multilingual capacity in their IPB site?

[Sonya*]

Well, I am bilingual myself. But I have never seen a forum where topics are mixed in different languages. Normally I see boards where separated forums created for each language, e. g.

• Help in English
• Hilfe in Deutsch
• Помощь по-русски
  

I appreciate this way more than having topics in different languages in one forum.

[m3rk0rd]

Normally I see boards where separated forums created for each language

That's a good point. In my case, my users are scientists who work internationally and many of them are comfortable switching between different languages to converse. One of the primary purposes of my board is actually to encourage dialogue between researchers in different countries, so one of my top priorities is making everyone feel comforable posting regardless of their primary language. In particular, I want to make the board more appealing to novices who may be more comfortable posting in their primary (non-English) language, and who may be intimidated if much of the content is in English when they visit the site.

I actually do have forums for regional issues, so for forums whose content deals mostly with English-speaking countries or users, I probably wouldn't bother translate the forums names. But for many of my forums it would be a great benefit to have the ability.

[sadp_1999]

I need the same feature all my forum are multilingual except the content...