How do the language setting work?

**Alfa1** · December 8, 2010

If I have the same article in multiple languages, then how do I manage that? i.e. how do I create language version of the same article?

How do I interlink all German articles for example?

If the language of an article is set to Dutch, then will the page source have lang="nl" so that search engines know its a Dutch page?

**pegasus** · December 8, 2010

1. You need VaultWiki: Server Settings > Multi-Language Support enabled.
2. For a page that has a counterpart written in another language, visit each version's Apply tab. You will be able to change the version's language here and enter the URLs of the other languages.
3. Linking to or within German articles is no different from linking any other wiki article. Just use the wiki-linking BB-Code for that namespace and the title of the article.
Note: There is no way to link to a German article using the English title. This would require 2 queries for every link.

If the language of an article is set, the page source will have the language code as defined in the vBulletin Language Manager. Otherwise, the article's language is considered to be the default forum language.

**Alfa1** · December 8, 2010

This page is only visible when reading the forum in the selected language. Changing the page's language will remove it from the current list of translations.

Wow! So the article will become invisible for readers that have set a different language. I certainly dont want that to happen. I just want people to easily find translations of the same article. Most of my German and Dutch members want to read the English articles.

Is there a way around this?

**pegasus** · December 9, 2010

The article does not become invisible. If they visit a URL that points to the English article, and their session is set to German, their session is changed so that they can view the article. If we had designed it so that the language selection was not changed, the article would be unreadable (encoding and phrasing issues), and it would also be unintuitive. There is a widget below the article that allows them to change which version they are viewing.

**Alfa1** · December 12, 2010

I currently have a separate German wiki area. My German members want to see both the English and German wikis. And my other members want to see all different languages.

How do I best accommodate that while still interlinking the articles?

**pegasus** · December 13, 2010

VaultWiki 3 is somewhat limited in how you can set up the wiki home page unless you make a custom page, or set up the German wiki as a new namespace (currently it's an Island).

You can move the German wiki forum to the wiki forum-category so that it's in the same part of the forums as your English wiki, that way it might have better visibility. If your German wiki is grouped in a German area, you can create a forum there that automatically redirects to the German wiki, using the Forum Link setting.

As for creating a custom wiki landing page, just create a new wiki page and set it up however you like. Then in VaultWiki: Server Settings > Replace Wiki Tab with URL, put the URL of the wiki page you created.

**Alfa1** · December 21, 2010

Interesting enough I have French, Itallian, Spanish, Polish member that all are translating wiki articles. I think this may be food for thought. My board does not have any of these languages installed and I am not going to install any of these languages. After all my site is 90% English, 5% Dutch and 5% German. 99% of my members from other countries can read English.

Still it would be nice to be able to link the translations to the original wiki with some automatic link feature (flags) in the future.
For now we will do this by hand.

Would it be useful to add a feature request?

**pegasus** · December 21, 2010

The problem with doing this is that languages must be defined somewhere. Currently languages are defined by vBulletin, and having VaultWiki do it separately will be redundant.

Having an un-tied language system will also cause issues when trying to connect the default view to a forum language that doesn't exist, or when thread prefixes are used that don't exist in the article's language (because the language isn't installed)... If you want to do this I would recommend turning off Thread Prefixes in wiki forums.

If you don't want to install any of those languages, here's what you do. Create those languages anyway, but make them clones of your default language with different names. Turn off user selection for the extra languages. IIRC, VaultWiki accepts translating for languages that can't be selected. Not sure what happens if you tried to view any of these translations, though.

**Alfa1** · December 21, 2010

I'd like it to be completely independent from forum language. Similar to how it works in wikipedia and more so in Joomla. A language is just a different category that users can browse to. Content should not be automatically replaced. Users can decide what they find important or interesting to read.

Its highly likely that vbulletin CMS 4.2 will have article languages, which does not tie into forum language and may work with flags. Maybe this feature is best to look at when vbulletin has something similar. Until then I will turn wiki languages off.

**pegasus** · December 22, 2010

Please make a feature request for this. It will still be necessary for admins to approve/create an acceptable list of wiki languages. It will also not be possible to do until Thread Prefix support is removed in VaultWiki 4.