Go and search your community for the phrase "sorry for my English."
I will wait, but I already know what you are going to find, because it is in every international community I have ever looked at. Somebody wrote a thoughtful, useful, entirely comprehensible post and then apologised for the language it was written in. Sometimes twice.
Nobody needs to apologise for having done a hard thing well. But the apology tells you something important: a portion of your members are doing every single interaction in your community at a cost that you, if you are working in your first language, do not pay at all.
Let us look at that cost properly and then work out what to do about it.
The quiet tax
Imagine reading a fast moving thread in your third language. You understand about eighty five percent of it immediately. The other fifteen percent requires context, guessing, or a tab you open on the side.
Now imagine wanting to contribute. You compose a reply. You read it back. You worry about a preposition. You reread the original post to check you have not misunderstood the joke. By the time you are happy with your two sentences, nine minutes have passed and the conversation has moved on and somebody else has said a version of your point.
That is the tax. It is not that these members cannot participate. It is that participation costs them five times what it costs everyone else, and that ratio compounds into something visible: they read a lot and post rarely. Then you look at your engagement patterns, conclude they are lurkers, and possibly write them off.
They are not lurkers. They are paying a toll every time they speak.
First decide the model, honestly
There are three workable structures and the wrong move is to drift between them without ever choosing.
One primary language, with deliberate support. Your community operates in one language, you say so plainly on the join page, and you actively lower the tax with the practical things below. This is right for most creators and it is not a failure of ambition. Being clear is kinder than being vague.
One community, parallel spaces. The main rooms run in your primary language, plus one or two spaces where members can talk in another language among themselves. Works when you have a genuine cluster, say fifteen or more members sharing a language. Works badly with three, because a room with three people in it feels like an empty annexe and confirms exactly the exclusion you were trying to fix.
If you do this, you need a member willing to keep that space warm, because you probably cannot. Ask them, define it, and thank them properly.
Separate communities. Two rooms, two languages, run as distinct things, possibly with your own participation in only one. This is a real business decision with real costs and it usually needs a paid co-host who is native in the second language. Only go here when there is clear demand and revenue to support it.
Pick one. Then say which one you picked, in writing, on your join page. A prospective member in Brazil or Japan or Poland deserves to know before they pay.
The changes that lower the tax most
These are small, cheap, and they help everyone. Do them regardless of which model you chose.
Write plainly. Shorter sentences. The common word instead of the clever one. The point at the top rather than at the end of a winding paragraph. This is the highest leverage change and it improves your writing for native speakers too.
Kill the idioms, or gloss them. Sports metaphors are the worst offenders because they are invisible to the person using them and completely opaque to everyone else. If you write "let us not put the cart before the horse," add three words that say the plain thing. You do not have to write like a manual. Just notice when a phrase depends on a culture rather than a language.
Slow down and write proper words in live chat. Abbreviations, initialisms, and typing in fragments make text chat much harder to follow for someone translating in their head.
Use headings and structure. Not for style. So that somebody scanning can locate the part they need without reading every line.
Post the important things in writing as well as saying them. A verbal announcement on a call is inaccessible in a way that a written post is not, because text can be reread, translated, and looked up. Video with no transcript is the hardest format of all.
Write dates with the month as a word, and always include a time zone. This is the single most common cause of a member in another country missing your event, and it is entirely fixable.
Machine translation, used honestly
Translation tools are extremely good now, and members are already using them on your posts whether or not you know it. Two implications.
Write in a way that translates cleanly, which is the same as writing plainly. Short sentences translate well. Long ones with three subordinate clauses and a joke in the middle become soup.
And if you translate anything yourself, say so. "This is a machine translation of my original post, apologies for any awkwardness" is honest, and it invites correction. What you should not do is publish machine translated material in another language while implying you wrote it, because the errors will be strange in ways that damage trust with the exact people you were trying to include.
Do not use automated translation for anything sensitive: a moderation conversation, a refund dispute, a difficult private message. Nuance is exactly what these tools lose, and nuance is the whole point in those moments. Slow down and be extra plain instead.
Never correct someone's language in public
This should be obvious and it happens constantly, always with good intentions.
Somebody posts with a small grammatical error, and a helpful member replies with the correction. The original poster now knows that their language is being assessed, and it will be another two months before they post again.
Set the norm explicitly, once, warmly: we do not correct each other's English here unless somebody has specifically asked for it. Then hold that line, including with the well meaning member who thinks they are helping.
If somebody has genuinely misunderstood something in a way that matters, respond to the content and quietly model the correct phrasing in your reply. That is how people actually learn a language anyway, and it costs nobody any dignity.
And go find that "sorry for my English" post and reply to it with something like: "Your English is completely fine and you never need to apologise for it here." That thirty second reply has an outsized effect, both on that person and on everyone reading.
Live calls are the hard part
A fast, overlapping, idiom heavy call in a second language is genuinely exhausting, and no amount of goodwill fixes that on its own.
Things that help. Turn on captions, always. Put questions in writing in the chat as well as asking them aloud. Say the plan at the start so people know where the conversation is going. Pause a beat longer than feels natural before moving on, because the person composing a sentence in their second language needs that beat. Treat chat contributions as fully equal to spoken ones and read them out.
And publish a written summary afterwards. Five bullet points. Costs you six minutes, and it turns an hour that was hard to follow into something anybody can use.
What not to do with nationality
A boundary here, because well intentioned creators sometimes cross it.
Do not collect or store members' nationality, ethnicity, native language, or immigration status. Do not add a field for it. Do not guess it from an email domain, a name, or an IP address and then act on your guess.
If you want to know whether a language space would be useful, ask a general, optional question: "Would a space to chat in a language other than English be useful to you, and if so which?" That is a question about a preference for a service, and it is answered voluntarily by people who want the thing. Completely different from building a demographic record.
Do not sort members into groups based on inferred location and treat them differently, particularly on price. And never publish anybody's country or language alongside their name without them choosing to show it themselves.
Also, get names right. Ask how somebody would like their name written and said, use exactly that, and do not shorten it or anglicise it for convenience. Never invent a nickname for somebody because their name is unfamiliar to you. This is a small courtesy that people remember for years, in both directions.
The upside, which is considerable
Here is the part worth being genuinely excited about.
A community with members in eleven countries is more interesting than one with members in one. You get different constraints, different markets, different regulations, different assumptions about what is normal in your field. Advice becomes less parochial. Somebody says "that is not how it works here" and everybody learns something.
You also get a community that is alive at more hours of the day, which changes the feel of the place entirely. Somebody is always around.
None of that arrives free. It arrives because you wrote more plainly, put a time zone next to every date, added captions, and told one nervous person that their English was fine. That is the whole job, and it is such a good use of an afternoon.
Do this this week
Search your community for "sorry for my English" and reply warmly to every instance.
Add a written time zone to every date you post from now on, and write the month as a word.
Turn on captions and publish a five point written summary after your next call.
Read your last three posts and remove every idiom that depends on your own country. Replace with the plain thing.
State your language model on your join page in one sentence, so nobody has to guess.
And if you have a cluster of members sharing a language, ask one of them whether a space of their own would be welcome. Then let them run it, thank them properly, and enjoy the fact that your community just got bigger in a direction you could not have built on your own.