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Hi Everyone, 

We just started with the community and are structuring our categories. We are struggling with the multilingual approach. At the moment we have 4 Parent categories: Welcome, product category, product category, Learn & Share. We would like our customer to be able to ask their question about the product in their own language (we serve 5 languages). So we structure the product category like this:

Parent category = product area

Child category = Language

 

How do other companies deal with multiple languages (and 1 community instance)?

 

Curious to hear about this!

Hello @jeroens 

Thanks for your patience!

There are a few ways that our customers have achieved multiple languages on the community:

Different categories in different languages, e.g. https://next.nutanix.com/ has a Japanese subcategory

Kaspersky has a language switcher
 

The case with Sonos Community:

  • They have a section with a parent category called “Other language forum”
  • Under this they have child category “Sonos Dansk forum” for Danish customers 

While creating Parent Categories per country, it is important to note that the master language will be the same across the platform.  

Let us know after you review these options.


Hi Isabel,

 

Thanks for you reply. I have seen the different options from Sonos and Kaspersky but we have decided to go into a different direction. We are going to try English master language parent and child categories and use the Tags to filter on language when a customer wants to dive deeper in the category. I have a little concern about the fact that only the most popular tags are shown, but we are going to give it a try. 

 

Please let me know if you feel that this is going into the wrong direction. But categorizing in English and having a separate (uncategorized) other language forum feels off. 

 

 


This may be completely whacky, but what are the chances of using something like the Google Translate API to allow users to select the language they prefer, and automatically translate any community content which is not in that language?

I know this wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but I’ve been hunting for a way to allow different native language users to participate in the same discussion - and this is the only idea I’ve come up with so far!

@Cristina - could you see this working?


This may be completely whacky, but what are the chances of using something like the Google Translate API to allow users to select the language they prefer, and automatically translate any community content which is not in that language?

I know this wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but I’ve been hunting for a way to allow different native language users to participate in the same discussion - and this is the only idea I’ve come up with so far!

@Cristina - could you see this working?

I know this post is 1 year old, but the scenario still exists for many of us. 
I agree with @Onomatopoeia  here. I’ve been using Google translate in our community for the last 5 months. I haven’t created an language-specific categories as I believe the work involved is greater than the result.
I’ve just added a post suggesting members use Google Translate. Let’s hope Gainsight can deliver our multi-lingual native functionality this year as per the roadmap 🤞


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