By Anonymous (not verified) on

Hi there,

I already saw some threads about changing the *GUI* language of drupal, but I am after his: is there a "best practice" to develop multi-lingual websites with drupal, i.e., the *content* of the sites itself shall be available in, e.g., English, German and French.

I'm looking for those lovely flag symbols or links ("English | French | German") which users/visitors can click on so, from then on, all the pages (=the content) are in the language they have chosen.

Adding multi-language support for the drupal GUI itself, e.g., the text on buttons or exchanging "add comment" with "Kommentar hinzufügen", is just the next step and not so important at the moment.

TIA,
Vil

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

I thought about adding a (new) block module with PHP code, which is basically used to set a language variable (e.g., lang=EN, lang=FR).

What I still have to check is how I can integrate this with the normal content management. The Locale module gives me the possibility to add translations to GUI content, maybe there is a way to use this for normal nodes too...

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

Ok, as expected, adding a second language to the Locale module (which is used for the GUI content like the "text" on buttons) doesn't give me a way to give one node multiple text/language versions.

Maybe we have to play with a taxonomy "language" and its terms "english", "french", "italian", and such?

But I really don't know yet how I could include this information in links, so I could distinguish language versions via those terms in normal HTML links...

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

If you find out something useful, please post it here! I think there are a lot of people out there who want to do exactly the same thing.

dody-1’s picture

dody-1 commented

I have the same problems with TIA, any ide for multi language with Drupal?

Dody.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

>> http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-support/2002-12/msg00044.html
>> http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2003-02/msg00440.html
>> http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2003-01/msg00174.html

Bèr

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

Is it possible to create 2 levels of the language support:
1. Multi language articles - (use one additional column for language select).
1.1 Browse articles by selecting languages to view, for example:
site could support 5 languages, viewer can select 3 of them to be viewable, base on form with multiple checkboxes.
1.2 One possibility to use with it translation to UTF-8 (Unicode) for text body, subject should be extended up to 350 characters because Unicode uses pattern ඀ (usually from 6 to 7 bytes per character in order to support 50 character long subjects), this way articles will be shown on its original language regardless of default page encoding.
1.3 Orientation of the text, for Arabic and etc.

You could check following text if clarity of the text remaining the same when you flip encoding of the page:
Greek Ελληνικα
Russian Русский

2. Default interface language, could be supported as language extension/templates with separate dialog definitions. Please make available language templates for mod extension.

--VladM

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

Your claim that Unicode uses &#xxxx; entities is weird: this is only if the character is not available in the current character set and if HTML is used.
Drupal uses UTF8 by default, which will uses 1-3 bytes per character for all practical usages. If your browser is still sending entities, it's misconfigured (check if it isn't forcing a specific character set).

If I paste your piece of text, it comes out correctly without entities (check the HTML source, look for this post).
Ελληνικα
Русский

chhai’s picture

chhai commented

My unicode appears the same as as Anonymous - August 18, 2003 - 23:41 with the ඀ too when I used php to create data. I want to understand how Drupal have utf-8 encoding by default.

vitali-1’s picture

vitali-1 commented

so far i've only found typo3.org to offer solution for having content in mutliple languages, but i was not able to figure out how to properly use it. xoops.org was another cms that seem to offer a possibility of having content in more than one language using hacked version of xoops, where you can enter content separated by square brakets tags into the same fieds [ru]Русский[/ru] [en]English[/en].
but still that seem's to be a half way done solution

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

The internationalization (i18n) module combind with the locale module I think will meet your need. The later handles translation of Drupal interface text, i18n allows you to had the same content in different languages.