Improving Multilingual Capabilities

[aia]

Ability to Set Language in the URL

For optimal SEO and multilingual support, it's important to allow setting the language in the URL.

Instead of having multiple languages in a single URL like invisioncommunity.com/forums/, we should have separate URLs for each language, such as:

• invisioncommunity.com/en/forums/,
• invisioncommunity.com/es/forums/,

etc.

This approach helps search engines accurately identify content in specific languages, leading to improved rankings for those languages.

Link Tags for Specific Languages

When different languages are presented on separate URLs, we can also inform search engines and browsers where other language versions can be found:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://invisioncommunity.com/en/forums/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://invisioncommunity.com/es/forums/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://invisioncommunity.com/en/forums/" />

Making Every Title, Item, Comment, and Other User Input Fields Translatable

Only a small portion of posts typically drive traffic to any website or community, and many authors of these posts (topics) would be willing to translate them into multiple languages if given the option.

While most users may not translate their less important messages manually, automated translation can handle this task well, especially with the advancement of LLMs in translation tasks today.

[Donnie95]

Hopefully v5 will come with multiple language packs by default.

[Randy Calvert]

6 hours ago, Donnie95 said:

Hopefully v5 will come with multiple language packs by default.

This is not something likely to occur. It’s not something talked about previously and IPS does not have teams of non-English speakers on staff to translate. 

If it is something they include by default, it becomes something they must maintain. Given the lack of resources to do so, it’s unlikely to occur. 

[Charles]

We would love to have multiple language packs b default but unfortunately translations are hard. We tried auto-translation software but the lack of context confuses it.

Our plan is to eventually gather statistics on what the popular languages are and look into hiring someone to maintain translations.

[aia]

I believe that language packs should be open source with a GitHub repository accepting pull requests, even if provided by IPS.

This approach will significantly reduce your maintenance costs and encourage more people to fix every little detail.

Automated translation can be a good starting point if done with state-of-the-art AI models like the latest Claude/Gemini Pro/GPT models, as their translation quality far surpasses that of Google Translate, DeepL, or any other outdated translation tools. Also, it's very possible to provide them with context, including the rendered code and auto-annotated, if needed.

But, to be honest, the most important things for my multilingual communities are listed in the first message of the topic. Language packs are good idea, but not as important as those. For websites, I generally use WordPress or Laravel, where I can easily make every title, item, comment, and other user input fields translatable. The lack of this feature in IPS is a major limiting factor for the growth of my IC-based community. If implemented, I would lean more towards IC than other alternatives.

Edited July 3 by aia

[Marc]

4 hours ago, aia said:

believe that language packs should be open source with a GitHub repository accepting pull requests, even if provided by IPS.

This is great in theory, but of course we would still need people who can speak the language to check those changes. Certainly by no means dismissing the idea. Just making you aware of potential pitfalls with it

[aia]

8 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

This is great in theory, but of course we would still need people who can speak the language to check those changes.

Certainly, but it's still cheaper and more robust than hiring them to do the whole job themselves, so I don't see any real cons here.