Bilingual Website

S

SelamT

Active member
Hello,

I have a forum with potential in my own country. I also have thousands of content in the resources add-on.
However, I would like to publish my contents in English, albeit manually.
Since the XenForo Admins are going through a big change these days, wouldn't they consider adding the ability to add dual languages?

There will be one id for each thread, resource, media gallery.
Titles, descriptions and URL structure will change automatically according to the selected language.

Also, links for both languages should be created in the sitemap.

For example:

Title TR:
Bu bir Test Konusudur

Title EN:
This is a test thread

Description TR:
Test konusunun açıklaması

Description EN:
Desription of the test thread

URL TR:

URL EN:

Can't such a feature be developed?
 
Upvote 1
SelamT said:
Can't such a feature be developed?
Click to expand...
Not really, no.

Where would the translation come from?
Google?
A built in database of every language?

Multiple different URLs with the same content ID?
That's going to be problematic on several levels.

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/bilingual-website.217571/
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/some-other-text.217571/

Why just stop the translation at the thread title?
What about the route or even the "community"?

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/bilingual-website.217571/
https://xenforo.com/community/konu/some-other-text.217571/
 
Paul B said:
Where would the translation come from?
Click to expand...
No, I'm willing to add them one by one myself.

Paul B said:
A built in database of every language?
Click to expand...
I think 2 languages would be enough, not unlimited languages.

Paul B said:
Multiple different URLs with the same content ID?
That's going to problematic on several levels.
Click to expand...
I have no idea about this, but I think a user would like it to appear in a language they understand, even if it's a url.

Facebook's multilingual feature is very good, but there the URL is a fixed number, so it's not a problem. Titles and descriptions can change easily.

Paul B said:
What about the route?
Click to expand...
I didn't understand the part with the route.
 
Hey @Paul B,

As far as I understand, a multi-language system is not very possible for contents.

Well, I want to publish my content in English and get traffic globally. How do you recommend me to use your system for this?
 
I just use the browser built in translation functionality.

I use it all the time in tickets, whether it be Chinese, Russian, or any other language.

As long as the content is translated, the URL that is displayed is irrelevant.
 
This way it is difficult to reach users all over the world. My first goal is to get the site in English in Google searches. Otherwise it is very difficult for users to reach the site :(

Maybe a plugin like Wordpress could be developed that automatically makes it multilingual.

For example: there is a site called extendoffice.com. When I do a search in Turkish, it appears as follows in the search results.

1699656818994.webp

The original language of the site is English, but a search in Turkish brings up results. Actually, I can say this is exactly what I want.

For the moment I guess we have no choice but to wait for this or to enter one content as two separate IDs.

Thank you for your attention :)
 
SelamT said:
For example: there is a site called extendoffice.com. When I do a search in Turkish, it appears as follows in the search results.
Click to expand...

That site uses a subdomain, you can see the Turkish version is on tr.extendoffice.com, so they have a clone of their website for every language.

Hmmm. If you wanted to do this automatically, without actually duplicating your website, I could imagine it's possible to some extent if you setup a reverse proxy and run page requests through a fast locally hosted translator which translates all text outside of <> tags and not within <script> and <style> tags. But then again what I'm describing is probably the functionality of any online website translating service, though applied at the level of your webserver.

Anyhow, doing this inside xenforo itself? Possible. However, at that point it won't show up in google search results because it wont be its own separate website on a different domain. Unless again it's implemented in such a way where appending ?language=en to any URL makes it english.

Then in your webserver configuration you can define such a server block:

Code: 
servername en.example.com {
  return try files *.php?language=en
}

Of some sort. Or the addon can be self-aware of what subdomain the url is showing and apply translations accordingly.
Then XenForo staff would be knocking at your door. Excuse me sir, are you running one license of XenForo on two different domains?? Sir you need to buy another license.

Because your proposal requires webserver configuration and separate subdomains being configured I find it very unlikely it would be added to XenForo itself, so you're better off requesting a custom addon: https://xenforo.com/community/forums/custom-service-development-requests.69/
 
The small technical point I would like to address for this is the default lang=eng (or language set for xenforo). It sure would be nice if we could set a node's lanuage. That way at least the search engines would get a clear signal which pages are in which language. After that, the main concern would be translating the menu into the second language. Seems like some changes to the template system are needed.

I have a forum about salsa dancing and music (salsaforums.com), and people speak about this topic in English and Spanish， but we have not allowed people to post in Spanish because we have found no way to allow this without it being confusing to users and search engines.
 
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