By reneb on

what is the best way to do multilingual sites in drupal?
i have several sites that need to be multilingual - from 2 to 8 (!) languages - and am kind of lost at how to keep things sane across languages.

one important thing is; when changing a language, i do NOT want to end up anywhere else but at the same page in a different language.
also, from the url, the language should be clear.

what systems have you guys used?
what makes sense and what doesn't after a while? :)

thanks for any pointers.

rene

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

BigMick’s picture

BigMick commented

localizer module would be your best friend...

I am one of the administrators of a multilungual site (6 languages at the time being), that is being built nowadays. Localizer can do the technical job (translation NOT, of course) quite well.

I suggest you to download this module and give it a try!

davemybes’s picture

davemybes commented

The other option is i18n, which I have used on a couple of sites. I can't comment on Localizer, as I've never used it, but both modules should do the job. One thing to notw, do NOT try both at the same time - they don't work together at all. I suggest trying each on separate Drupal installs just to be safe.

i18n has been around longer than Localizer, so might be better developed. However, Localizer has some neat options like using the language code like a subdomain (http://en.yourdomain.com), or as an argument in your URL (http://yourdomain.com/?=en), whereas i18n only does http://yourdomain.com/en/path.

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reneb’s picture

reneb commented

thanks both for the comments.
i'll defintely try out both modules.

meanwhile, what interests me is how you deal with taxonomy in multilingual sites?
especially when you use for example tagadelic for navigation - do you translate every single taxonomy term/tag or do you use one language for all and just have the nodes in multiple languages?

thanks again

BigMick’s picture

BigMick commented

The latter with localizer

davemybes’s picture

davemybes commented

i18n allows you to use either one term for all languages (just set the term to no language), or you can translate the term into the different languages and then link them together so that the correct one appears for each language.

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Kriskaido’s picture

Kriskaido commented

Hi,

This is the post I was looking for :)
I'm playing with i18n, tagadelic and two languages (french/dutch). I added one french vocabulary, one for dutch, both in free tagging mode, and of course in the vocab definition, I specified the language for each. I added those two blocks in the sidebar, so I was expecting that the dutch block would appear when dutch is selected and the same for french, but they both appear at the same time, whatever language is chosen ...
Did I miss something ?

Any help would be very appreciated,

Kris.

julienb’s picture

julienb commented

kriskaido,
you have to create 3 blocks for your 3 languages.
hide each one of them
and ... create a multilingual block =>>> you'll have to associate each language with each one of the 3 blocks you created before...
activate (unhide) this multilingual block!

and when you'll select a language, the good block will appear!