By adshill on

Good afternoon,

So I'm trying to implement a multi-lingual site in French and English. However most people are bi-lingual who will be using the site and they would be collaborating in both languages. Unfortunately there is a "political" issue that means that content (other than comments) needs to be in both languages. However it appears that it is impossible to implement this situation with Drupal - as far as I can see - and I would appreciate if anyone has found a way to manage this.

I am using the locale, internationalisation modules as well as organic groups (og). We need something very simple, where a user clicks on a group title in "my groups" which takes them into the group where they are presented with the group, and group posts (all one content type in ron style) on the home page. Clicking on one of these posts, they would be taken to the post which is basically a simple question, which they can then post on.

The issue is that the internationalisation and in-built language facilities of drupal always create a new node in order to create the translation. This means in terms of groups, it is impossible to put one set of posts inside the groups for each language, and in terms of the posts, the comments will be different.

Is there any way to get around this or is Drupal as it stands simply not up to it?

Many thanks for any help/comments/suggestions and have a very pleasant day/evening.

Adam

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

For a different approach to multilingual content, take a look at http://drupal.org/project/language_sections which puts all languages on the same node (or generally on the same textarea), using some filter tags.

I haven't tried it myself, but the concept seems much simpler and straightforward. I am not sure what "real multilingual" means.

adshill’s picture

adshill commented

Many thanks,

I've actually installed this and it works great for the body text, but doesn't do anything for the page title, so in theory makes it not so useable. I have posted on a feature request on the module in the hope I can pay for development or get a hack... I don't need so much menu items to be translated as these are not really held in a menu, just the title.

Having researched for the last 5 hours I'm pretty sure that this is something people would find useful but haven't had the time to develop. Maybe "Real Multilingual" was not the best title to use :) what I mean is that multiple languages are being used on the SAME node, not simply giving a different node for a different language and therefore splitting any collaboration between people speaking different languages. Modules such as the Comment Translator make this much more feasible now and in my case as I say, we have a multi-lingual audience so it's necessary to combine posts and comments in one place, not split them. Hope that makes sense!

Thanks again for your help, I'll keep looking/thinking and see if we find a solution.

adshill’s picture

adshill commented

I've gone for a really dodgy hack so far by adding in a new "French Title" CCK field and used themes and views to change it on different pages dependent on the language. This obviously will only work for this very simple site... but it completely useless in terms of integration with the rest of drupal!

Any input or potential development of this would see real interest from me and could potentially result in an investment.

Thanks.

kewlguy’s picture

kewlguy commented

It is my understanding that the current implementation of i18n does create separate nodes for each language, though, I find when I look at the actual database table that there is a column that relates the 2 nodes so that only one of each shows up for each language.

I am currently working on creating a multilingual site and I do find that this works and can work well. Of course there are a few different patches to be applied along the way.

The language instructions are very diverse and I find that one must be careful of the hacks that are often created to implement multi-language.

One of the most difficult things for me to get my head around has been the fact that I need to be in the admin of the french language before much of this would work for me.

I have also found that there are many variables that need to be added to the settings.php file and a cron run must be done before entering the french admin to implement the changes.

This is still a work in progress for me though if need be I might be convinced to provide the list of patches that I have needed to apply so far.

I am not prepared to document my findings on drupal.org yes, not until I am a little further along, though, so far I have one menu that works correctly and I have the contact form working correctly and my site information with footer working correctly, though, I am still working on the taxonomy side of things as well as working on dropping the language neutral from the forms...sigh!

My advice is stick with the most current handbook pages and the issues for each the i18n module as well as the (L10n)l10n module also known as the localization client. Be careful of the comments because some folks find some interesting workarounds that do not necessarily follow the methods of drupal. MAKE SURE YOU ARE IN THE FRENCH ADMIN AREA WHEN LOCALIZING!