Internationalization

Drupal has some excellent translation functions but deciding which modules to use and how to configure the modules is challenging. There are many different possible configurations depending on your website needs, domain names and content. You'll find there are a lot of choices of modules for setting up a multilingual site.... then there are a lot of key configuration items to enable depending on your website.

This post focused on Drupal 6 modules and issues. We will give some example of the difficult decision making involved in translating content. There is no out-of-the-box configuration that seems to work, it all depends on the needs of your website. There are many different modules to choose from in core and contrib and a lot of their functions overlap.

The best advice is to start with the core multilingual modules and then add other modules when needed. Good Luck Bon Chance Viel Glueck 幸運 Buona fortuna 好运 Buena suerte Удача

Watch Ravi as he demonstrates how easy it is to create bilingual or multi-lingual content in Drupal. Ravi is demonstrating how this module works in Drupal 4.7 with a bilingual site. He demonstrates how language switching allows you to jump back and forth between the two versions of your document.

Drupal 6.0 was just released yesterday and we're pretty excited about this as we've been watching the latest release evolve over the last year now.

We wanted to highlight just a few of the enhancements we've seen over 5.x:

Having multilingual site in Drupal is getting easier, especially with some of the major advances in the core code. Had a solution for theme based language switching that I figured was worth putting out there.

The CiviLingua project was an attempt to build i18n/l10n into CiviCRM core in the late 1.6 / early 1.7 release era. Details are available on the CiviCRM wiki:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviLingua+-+support+for+multi-lingual+sites

And in my earlier blog posts:

Some of the existing English documents did not have a parent category in the database. This meant that the breadcrumb for those categories was not necessarily useful,

The following article is part of a series on Setting up a Drupal Site for Internationalization.

Using i18n_variables to Enable Translation of Module-Specific Variables

In some cases, we need to translate elements of the user interface that are not part of a regular node or part of the .po system for translating strings. For these elements, we can sometimes use i18n_variables (http://drupal.org/node/67824).

I solved this problem a while ago, but didn't have the docs handy or in my blog, so decided to post this quickly here. I needed to pass along the current language along to a variable in my template, but had to define it first as phpTemplates doesn't define it by default. It's a pretty simple process if you have a handle on PHP.