Every Language is Welcome

Hey all 👋

I've been spending a lot of time on multilingual support at Discourse lately, and the more I dig in, the more I realise how much there is to do. I wanted to share why we care about this so much and what's coming.

The short version of what we believe at Discourse: a community’s language should not be the factor that stops someone from participating in a community. Whether your forum runs in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or Mandarin, there will always be people who want to join but don't speak that language fluently.

This isn't new for us

We built i18n into Discourse in 2012, our first year, and community members were already advocating for proper internationalization back in 2013. One of them said it best: "Give internationalization proper love and the product will spread across the world." We listened, and they were right.

Since then we've gone from basic locale files to Crowdin, from a community translation plugin to official AI-powered translation, and from "we should probably do this" to a dedicated project team working on it full-time. It's been a long road and we're still on it.

The thing that made it urgent

Communities have always been global, even when their topics aren't. An open-source project attracts contributors who speak Portuguese, Turkish, Polish. A gaming community draws players whose first language is Arabic or Mandarin. Even our own team at Discourse spans 24 countries and speaks over a dozen languages. We don't need to imagine a multilingual community, we are one. We've heard from customers for years, from international NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa, to gaming companies in Nigeria, asking us to help them reach people in their language.

But it got real for us in late 2024 when Gerhard (Discourse engineer!) showed that Discourse.org was invisible in German Google search results 🙀 If someone searching in German couldn't find us, how many communities were invisible to their own potential members?

That was the "oh no" moment that turned conviction into action.

A number that surprised us

We’ve looked at the browser language settings of visitors to meta.discourse.org, our (primarily) English-language support forum over a 30-day window.

36% of visitors had a non-English primary language. Over 80 distinct languages. Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese... and a long tail of dozens more.

The gap between the language a community operates in and the languages its people actually speak is where participation and equitable community ownership dies. Every person who can't comfortably read or write in the forum's language represents  a question that doesn't get asked, and a contribution that doesn't get made.

What's coming

This is the first in a series I'm calling Discourse Without Borders. Over the next few posts I’ll aim to cover:

• How we built multilingual support into the platform - from a community-contributed plugin in 2013 to AI-powered translation today
• What it's actually like to use Discourse in another language - data from our own community, honest about what works and what doesn't
• A practical playbook for structuring a multilingual community - the models, the tradeoffs and the setup
• Real examples of communities getting this right

I'm genuinely excited about this series. And if you're running a community (or thinking of building  one) and are wondering whether multilingual support matters for you, I think the data will surprise you. It certainly surprised us!

We would love to hear from folks who are already navigating this. What's working? What's painful? Drop a reply or find me on meta!

Next up: From Plugin to Platform - how Discourse built multilingual support over 13 years (coming soon)