Can I work outside of Drupal?

Hi Forum,

My first post and I am a total beginner with Drupal.

I've a contract for a company that uses a managed solution whereby a third party creates and maintains all marketing content on my client's corporate internet site. The current corporate site is English-only and suited to the daily running of an established business. The quality is good and we don't want to change.

My task is to establish local presence for the company in new, non-english-speaking markets. For that I need a very different website in a new language. The new website should be accessible from the corporate site and vice-versa.

Normally for such work, I'd create the site and host it locally using PHP/HTML or a Joomla CMS (because that is what I know). In this case, I proposed a content for the local company to implement as a single landing page for the local bases.

The web maintainer told me that you can't enter foreign language content into an English language site without installing a plug-in and translating the whole site. Surely that can't be right. Is there not a simple way to get a single page linked to the Drupal site in a new language without getting to grips with the CMS at this stage? From my scan of the manual and other forum entries, it sure does look as though Drupal would try to convert my content to English, can I not flag the text somehow to get Drupal to render the page nicely but ignore the fact that it isn't English?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Richard