Are my plans realizable?
 

Hey guys,

our forum is now based on vBulletin v4.x and we plan to make some major changes.
Here's what we want to do (we plan to use vb5):

Our forum should be used from people from 4 to 5 main countries (de, es, fr, en, it). First we wanted the users to use the forum in english, but unfortunately most of our users come from germany and are not willing to post in englisch. So we created some subforums, where users can post in their on language.
Now only the subforums are used and 80% of the post are form german users - so the forum is really not relevant for users from france, uk or spain.
What we want to do now (and we know, that this is not the best solution - but we have to change somethin and maybe it's a smaller hurdle for the users to use our community), is to translate all posts via google translate api, so the users can read all posts in their own (not perfect) language.

I want to leave the structure of the thread tables in the database as they are, but only change the post-tables and add 5 tables with the same content in different translated languages (same thread id etc). If a user opens the forum the system checks by browser language, ip or whatever where the user comes from and loads the appropriate language from one of the post tables. Therefore I would have to make some template changes of course.
And of course i would need to get into the post creation process to make a http or curl request via php to activate the translation script, when the post is created. Are there hooks or something like this for this process, so i could easily add a process to the post/thread creation, without making to big changes in the system itself?

To be honest, we were/are thinking about switching to woltlab burning board 3 and already checked, if this is possible - and it's quite easy. But vBulletin v5 is quite impressing, so we want to stay (really like the mobile version =)).
3 other Questions:
1. Did you change the update process in vbulletin v5? I really didn't like it and we often had some problems with the downloads from the costumers area, uploading it via ftp and stuff...
2. How much changes can I make in the native iOS and Android Apps? You remember the plans with the different post-tables? Can I somehow pick, where to load the posts from?
3. We ordered the vbulletin v4 license from vbulletin-germany.com. The new versions can only be bought on vbulletin.com and we have no customer account so far. Do we still get the upgrade?

Thanks in advance for your help. Would love to stay on vBulletin :)
kddc

Sorry if this post is 2 times in the list, but its not listed for me :-O