Multiple Languages on VB

[Steve B]

I am thinking of installing vB to use as a community forums as part of a translation site. It is a large site that it’s already established which has up to 7000 individual users per day and the current software is no longer able to cope. I have experience with VB and use it on another site but I have never dealt with more than one language.

My question is concerning the languages and how flexible it is, the site caters for English, German, Spanish and possibly in the future Chinese natives. Is it possible to set up the forums to support all these different languages and allow the users to switch (I presume using styles? ) between the four as they wish? If so what extras would I need and how would I go about setting this up?

Thanks in advance for you advice.

[Colin F]

Yes, vBulletin allows that. While we currently only offer an official English, German, Chinese and Hungarian language pack, you can easily translate the other languages yourself, as everything is based on a language / phrase system.

[Scott MacVicar]

I'd also recommend using UTF-8 for your character sets to avoid problems when you view posts in different languages.

[feldon23]

Spanish, French, and other popular languages are available as translated by fellow vBulletin users.

Note that what is being translated is the vBulletin interface and text. It does NOT automatically translate what users post into different languages (nor would automatic translation of user posts ever be accurate enough to be worth the massive server load).

[Steve B]

Thanks for the replies gents

I realise that the content of the posts are not translated at all and I don’t want that as it is a language based site designed to encourage sharing and help from within the community It is all the phrases and instructions etc that I would like to include in multiple languages and allow each user to use the forums in their native language, I assume that I would download the extra language packs and install those, do they also include the image packs for the buttons as well or would I have to design a full set to suit each language myself?

Finally to allow the users to switch, would I just create four different styles and assign each a different language pack?

Again thanks for your time

[Colin F]

Actually, you'd create Languages and not Styles. Users can select the Language in their UserCP Options.

The official language packs should include buttons, others might not.