DrupalCon: Localization & Multilingual

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Two main methods of localizing a Drupal site were presented: manually translating your site, and using a service called ICanLocalize.com.

The Manual Method

Many different things to translate: Site name, slogan, custom menu items, menu items from views, categories and terms, content, ....

Three main categories of translatables

1. User Interface
2. Strings created by admin (such as field names, cck names)
3. Content created by users

Important modules

• Core Modules: Locale and Content Translation modules
• Contributed modules: Internationalization, Localization Client which imports interface translations from localize.drupal.org, Localization Update which eases translation of the rest of the interface

First Steps

• Add languages to your site
• Set language negotiation settings ("path prefix with language fallback" was recommended.)

Menus

• Don't print menus directly in them. Include them as blocks instead.
• You have the choice of using a separate menu per theme, or translating each menu item individually.

Content Types

• Enable multilingual, with translation.
• Set current language as default.
• Require a language.

Enable the language switcher block

On all blocks, set a translation. Then translate the text of the blocks by using the translation interface.

Multilingual variables

• Override in settings.php
• Examples: site name, slogan, frontpage, site footer
• Edit settings.php, re-save the settings page in Drupal, then start translating

Translating a node

• On node, go to the Translation tab
• Creates a copy of the node, for the different language
• Edit menu title here
• Now, there are more links listed in the menu.
• Go back to existing menu items and specify language.

Views

• Add filter for node translation
• Use the translation client for the menu title and page title.

Forums options

• Separate set of terms (forums) for each language (this is generally preferred.)
• Translate each term into each language

ICanLocalize.com

Drupal module to connect to icanlocalize

Provides human translators, quick turnaround, automated Drupal integration.

Other notes

Drupal sets the language header. Search engines normally detect this and are aware of the language the page is written in.