Hi all. Late to the party on this new topic, excuse my delayed reply.
Regardless of what ends up being the topic structure of this forum, to have a translator plugin is critical to integrating our global community which is a huge goal of this forum. It ought be a high priority to implement.
After bringing it up in the previous topic I heard concerns of the imperfection of machine translation (for the record, give DeepL a try it’ll blow your mind) but this is just conjecture - the only way to see if this would work for our community is to try it out.
I agree fully with the comment above. Is the point of this forum not to bring us all together? Before we segregate our community by language and silo our conversations away from eachother based upon a barrier that in 2022 can be addressed by technology, we owe it to ourselves to try a translation plugin.
After testing out the plugin, it may be clear that language-specific spaces are the only way to go forward for our community, and that’s OK! At least we tried! And, we can still keep the translation plugin for curious users who want to see what other language communities are discussing!
For sure there may be implementation issues wrt to translating topic titles or getting notifications of posts in other languages, things getting confusing with multiple languages in a category…I’m not convinced this will solve everything.
But if we are to create language-specific spaces now there is no going back to delete categories, we already know how this goes in OSM, I’ve no hope we can reach consensus to change something back after it’s already been done. Just the reality.
To not give the translation plugin a try will be a huge missed opportunity, and I see no reason why we don’t try it. There really is no risk. And, I’m happy to help in the tech side of things to implement it, just let me know.