non-English version of the forum? (Q for the system admin)

Hello - I’m the area technology specialist in Asia North and we are trying to provide a tool such as this forum to our technology specialists in Korea and Japan.

(the reason for this is that there are many technically competent people in these countries who do not happen to have sufficient English skill to navigate and use this forum)

I’m interested in opening a dialog with the *system* administrator of this site (not the content moderators). Does anyone here have someone they can direct me to? I’ve looked around but couldn’t find what I was looking for.

I’m in the workforce directory, if that helps facilitate communication.

Thank you in advance for any info you can provide!

I oversee the Forum. It uses phpBB. There are language packs. There is a Japanese language pack, but I don't see a Korean language pack.
https://www.phpbb.com/languages/index.php
I see a contributed Korean language pack here:
https://github.com/minwook-shin/phpbb-korean
We are currently running version 3.1.10 and would probably need to upgrade to 3.2.8 first.
I'd like to get OAuth in place at some point. I don't have much time allocated to supporting this site at work, so updates come slower than I'd like.
I added Japanese to the current install. You can test it by choosing Japansese language under your username dropdown on the upper right.
Notice that board text is translated, but message content is not. I see that some messages have not yet been translated. For example: SEE_ALL and MARK_ALL_READ.
pbpBB is available for free. Contributions to the language packs would be appreciated. We could add some non-english forums, but our current moderators will not be effective at moderating content there, so we would need some active monitors with both English and non-english language skills. This is not a trivial effort. The forum has both Spanish a Portuguese installed for quite some time, but there are no active Spanish or Portuguese forums.

I wonder if there are any phpBB plugins that provide a "Translate this message" button? Combined with translated buttons and menus, it would allow people from different countries to interact in the same forums (rather than creating a separate forum instance for a new language).

I use Google Chrome with the Google Translate plugin:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... cleb?hl=en

How well does that do with multi-lingual pages? For example, if a post is in English, and replies are in Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean, is it able to recognize the distinct languages and translate each section separately?

You can select and translate the entire page, or any selected text. It works well.

I'll note that the success of a forum depends on "critical mass". That is enough posts to keep people coming back. Especially the helpful types that answer the questions. This forum generally represents all of North America and has what I'd consider a moderate amount of activity. Based on the number of stakes I count in CDOL, I would suspect a forum dedicated to just Japan/Korea would lack sufficient traffic maintain momentum.

I think a better first step would be to install available language packs to help the navigation, and to use Google Translate for the messages. We've had a number of Spanish speaking posts here, and we've used Google Translate to work with them.

Once the traffic builds up to a sufficient level, then the idea of a dedicated section or a dedicated forum becomes more viable.