Hello

I am building a site in 2 languages on my XAMP development setup.
I have installed core modules
Locale
Content Translation
Internationalization (i18n)
Localization Client (L10n_client)

But running into two problems.

1. Within the node content there is a link to switch to the alternative language.
That works fine if using the site in Administrator mode.
The content AND the interface switches.

However if I am using the site as an Anonymous user the node
link will only change the content of the node - not the interface elements.
For that matter the language switcher block in the right side bar
doesn't work for Anonymous users either.

I guess it has something to do with Role permissions but I have
played around and so far havent found what I need to do to
enable interface language switching for Anonymous users.

2. What I said above about everything working fine in Administrator role is
not 100% correct. The primary links are in English and don't switch to
the alternate language when I use either the content node or language
switcher block, even in Admin role.

I was wondering about the best way to
make the Primary Links language sensitive.

Some quick help would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

TWD’s picture

Anybody?

I heard that Primary Links just downright don't respond to language switching.

Could this be true?

-Anti-’s picture

> I heard that Primary Links just downright don't respond to language switching

I think the primary/secondary VERTICAL menu blocks are translatable. But the HORIZONTAL menus in themes are not. I don't know if this is a simple themeing issue (eg. not passing the menu items list through 't' in the template file), or whether translation only works for menu items that are in blocks (I've never seen a theme with a horizontal menu in a block). In addition, last time I tried (3 months ago), the block and menu block translation was still very buggy and inconsistent anyway.

I don't know about your 'anonymous user' problem. I didn't even get to the stage of testing out different user roles. I gave up long before even getting any sensible language translation as superadmin. I vowed never to try to build a multilingual D6 site again. I mean, kudos to the people who tried to make Drupal's language handling better, but the current implementation gets a big, fat thumbs-down from me - 'almost there' is not enough in this particular instance. Let's see what D7 brings.

TWD’s picture

Thats a bummer :(

-Anti-’s picture

If multi-language is important to you, then you should give it a go anyway:

Firstly, getting 90% there may be acceptable to you. It wasn't enough for my purpose.
Secondly, it will be a learning experience and you'll get to know Drupal better.
Thirdly, there is still a small chance that things that are broken now may still get fixed in D6.
Fourthly, language is supposed to be improved in D7. If you set-up your site now, it might
mean less work if you upgrade to D7 in a year or two.

Just be aware that you may spend a lot of time sorting out issues.
I squandered 100+ hours on translation, before giving up.

Note that the actual core node translation works quite well (except for the fact that the translated nodes have separate comments; personally I'd prefer it if we were able to have one thread of comments shared between the translated nodes. However, you might *like* them separated). It is the translation and visibility of multilingual menus, blocks, taxonomy, content-types, cck fields and views that are all buggy and limited to varying extents, and it is this that will drive you crazy due to the complexity, instability and inconsistent behaviour.

Your anonymous problem is not a bug that I've heard of before. Since the language choice uses cookies, perhaps you could try deleting the cookies in your browser in case it got corrupted. Also, flushing the cache (admin -> site config -> performance) never hurts when things aren't working as intended, although I do that more out of superstition and desperation than anything else.

For the menus, I can't give you any advice. I tried three or four different methods, and all failed in one way or another. However, it is possible that you are not working under the same design and functionality constraints that I had.

Good luck.

Anonymous’s picture

Not sure if it will address your problem specifically but I stumbled on the module below which helped me a lot with translation related problems. I hope it can help you!

http://drupal.org/project/translation_table