Hey @cstrange - I’d also love to hear what other members of our community would say. But I’ll quickly share my personal experience from managing multi-language communities for TomTom and Sonos in the past. Basically, I took your option #2 and worked with our Support teams to get some native language support (often just an hour or two per day, as volumes for non-English were relatively low). I always felt it was important to have robust moderation in place, which for me meant getting eyes on all posted content. So leveraging champions alone felt risky to me, but that’s not to say that this is a bad approach necessarily - it can definitely work. Nowadays, with the high quality of automatic translation services, you could likely also get the core ‘monitoring’ work done by someone who isn’t native in that language. What approach are you thinking of taking?
We have additional Dutch and German language instances of Gainsight CC, however for our English speaking community where we sometimes get other languages (French and Spanish) most of our mods use Google Chrome browser which has a nifty built in translation tool. So they right click, translate to English, read the content. Then write up an answer and then use a translation tool (Google translate, GenAI, internal tools etc) to translate. Including a blurb at the end of their response that it was created using google translate. It’s relatively quick and doesn’t take much longer than normal.
We also have a Nordic sub category under the “other languages” parent category, and considering the increasing amount of French and Spanish language content, we’re considering opening additional sub categories for those languages.
We also see some of our top users utilizing browser translation features to answer languages other than English.