By nathantpham on

Hi,

I am completely new to Drupal. I am very excited about setting up a bilingual site to be hosted on midPhase. I recognize that the learning curve is steep, but I hope have a working site within a few weeks time (but there is no rush if more time needs to be invested). I am trying to create a bilingual site (English and Vietnamese) for a local organization. I don't want to start off on the wrong foot and then have to backtrack later.

After doing some preliminary search, it seems that i18n is the preferred module to use. However, I have read that it can be difficult to implement and some Drupal users have instead created a db for each language and thus create a separate site for each. What is recommended?

Should I begin by abandoning the i18n route and instead install two instances of drupal into www.mydomain.com/en and www.mydomain.com/vn? Then I could update each site independent of the other. However, I'd like to eventually create a forum in which both sites could access, regardless of which language people input.

I could use some starting advice.

Thank you,
Nathan

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

amalaer’s picture

amalaer commented

Hi Nathan

I'm not an expert but i18n worked for my multilingual sites (one of which is also in EN and VI). Have a look at the build multilingual sites pages. The following module might also be of interest http://drupal.org/project/viet_typing. And maybe you've visited those already: http://groups.drupal.org/vietnamese and http://vietcoop.net/.

If you're interested I can give you my step-by-step documentation of the initial setup tasks. It's just one possible solution but maybe it'll help to get you started.

If you still decide against i18n, have a look at multisite setup in Installation guide and multisite setup in Tutorials (instead of installing two instances).