Just starting this conversation (inevitably in English) with a statement that The Social Music Network must be a multilingual space where people should be able to ask and discuss in their preferred languages.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that every language will have a critical mass of savvy speakers or that everyone will get a response regardless of the language used. But we will strive to welcome multilingualism and find technical and social solutions within our possibilities.
Discuss. 
Do you speak a language other than English? I strongly encourage you to create a new topic like these ones:
You don’t know whether you will reach a critical mass? Me neither, and I’m even trying in small tiny lovely Catalan! 
It’s part of the experiment, and the learning.
I also want to get real multilingual users to discuss possible solutions together.
I have been thinking… and I believe we should go for the full package: enable automatic translation and let everyone post in their preferred language anywhere (except topics or areas specifically designated for a specific language). In theory, this is doable thanks to several giant’s shoulders:
Discourse already allows user to select the language of the interface. We just have to enable this setting.
The Multilingual plugin allows to identify the language of a post, the translation of content like categories and tags, and the ability for users to select the languages they want to see and filter out the rest.
The Discourse Translator plugin offers automatic translation of posts by connecting to a translation engine. This allows users to post in their preferred language, and other users just need to click a 
button to get that text translated to their preferred language. These translations are cached for future readers, saving redundant calls to the translation engine.
LibreTranslate is a free and open source machine translation engine and API, that can be installed in your own server and feed Discourse Translator.
I’m familiar with all these pieces except LibreTranslate, which I have never user, even less installed. If anyone has advice for the simplest installation guide, I welcome all the help.
I plan to set this up over the weekend. Feedback welcome!
Some progress today.
If you want to use The Social Music Network in your language, the first step is to select it in Profile > Preferences > Interface > Interface language.
This is possible because today I have enabled these settings:
I’m not sure what has happened, but I have found problems and inconsistencies with this plugin, and I have uninstalled it. Maybe it isn’t needed.
Now posts have a icon at the bottom, and if you click it, you should get an automatic translation to the language you have defined in your preferences.
I wasn’t able to make LibreTranslate and Discourse talk to each other locally in the virtual server. I decided to purchase an API key as a short term solution, while we figure out how good is the multilingual system with automatic translations. Also, how much needed it is, althouth we need to have it in place to attract speakers of non-English languages – otherwise we are building a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Please share your experiences with these automatic translations!
It is good to see that the Discourse team is working on the Translator plugin. From the last release, which we have installed today: 3.5.0.beta2: Review Queue, Welcome Banner, Admin Interface, and more - #3 by tgxworld - Announcements - Discourse Meta
