listead the wluke about the storing, he knows a lot more than i do. The reason i thought database is it is easier (i would think) to change and update and add new fields in that was why, and i thought if all the contents were pulled for the page it would just be one more query but he knows more about these things!

The auto translation is a problem, i played around with this with bable fish and found the results to be so bad it is not worth the effort. The problem is in forums people are generally reasonably "slangy" because they are talking to each other rather that writing more formal webpages (i am sure some forums are different this is just what i have noticed). Of course, bablefish can't do slang, shortened words etc. I know it is a slightly unfair test but translate a page of text from english to french and back again, ekk... i got some of my french members to write some french to translate (ie how they would write on forums in french) and well i could hardly make sense of it. I just hope improvement comes in these translation tools but i wonder how much they really can improve?

On the whole what language is it in, i would do something like this:

Fields needed in profile

1) Default language (ie the viewing pit)
2) Other languages you can speak (multiple box).

now, the board translates everything into 1.

now if someone who has languages select in part 2 of the profile, goes to post, then a checkbox is also there saying "Is this post in French, German etc" (which one for each language they speak".

does that make sense?

Then, if auto-translation is installed, someone with default language 1, comes to a post that is marked "french" (because the person who posted it said it was in french) and it translates it to default language, (with a message to say this it has done this and a link to see the message how it was originally).

i think the only way to do this is really get the members to click to say that the post is in whatever non-default language it is in. Profile can have extra fields to say "have in french checkbox default ticked" for example.