If you have great topics in your forum, you should get visitors from many countries, even if they do not speak the main forum language. I’ll talk about a proper multilanguage setup of your forum in this blog post.
One of the advantages of MyBB is the amount of languages available for the forum software.
There are currently the following 28 languages for MyBB available:
- englisch (of course
- portugese
- french
- urdu
- persian
- spanish
- polish
- italian
- hungarian
- german (formal and informal)
- dutch
- serbian
- turkish
- norwegian
- albanian
- vietnammese
- hindi
- myanmar
- estonian
- hrvatska
- danish
- kurdish
- czech
- hebrew
- arabic
- chinese
You should be aware that these languages might be incomplete. But they are a good start for your multilanguage forum.
If you want to have a forum where people discuss in multiple languages, there are two ways to tackle it. The first way is topic focussed, the second way is language focussed.
If you have rather simple topics and a strong forum community with multilanguage capabilitites you can use the topic focussed approach.
The topic focussed approach has topic related forums where all accepted languages can be spoken. A thread may be started in both, english or german for example. If your staff or core forum members do create new threads they should create them in both languages to reach the whole audience.
The chances of this approach are less topic duplication and more connectivity and discussion between your members. The risk is in the language barriere for those who do not understand both languages. They might not be able to participate in deep or with speakers who do not speak their native language.
If you can not go for a topic focussed approach you’ll have to use the language focussed approach. In this case you should create seperated threads or even better seperated forums for each language. You’ll probably end up with duplicate threads discussing the same topic but in different languages.
This might work better for SEO and people who do not speak both languages but it might weaken your forum community. You’re running the risk of less communication between the two fractions.
I do prefer a mixed solution on my multilanguage forums. There are subforums which do share both languages and some are reserved for the specific languages.
You should think about this way, it’ll improve your business for sure if you do offer more than one language for your users.