Multilingual Guide
You can configure a Drupal website to use a language other than English and you can configure a site to use multiple languages.
If your site uses only one language, you can install a distribution which allows you to select the interface from more than 80 available languages. For more information, see the Localized Drupal Distribution project page.
If your site requires the interface to be displayed in multiple languages or if you need to customize the interface of a single language site, the first step is to enable the multilingual capabilities of Drupal.
You can also configure a Drupal site to allow your users to switch languages and you can translate content into multiple languages.
For information about writing code for localized modules, see the Localization API and the Multilingual support section of the Develop for Drupal guide.
The following resources are also helpful when building multilingual sites:
- Internationalization bundle of important contributed modules
- Translations for Drupal core, modules and themes
- Language-specific communities
Translating site interfaces
When enabled, the Locale core module allows you to present your Drupal site in a language other than the default (English). You can use it to set up a multilingual web site or to replace the elements of the interface text with text which has been customized for your site. Whenever the Locale module encounters text, it tries to translate it into the currently selected language. If a translation is not available, the string is remembered, so you can look up untranslated strings easily.
The Localization Update module can automatically retrieve translations from http://localize.drupal.org. For languages where translation has already been done, you do not have to do anything other than set up this module. In Drupal 6 and 7, the Localization Update module is a contributed module. For Drupal 8, it is part of core.
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