Using translation module, create 2 nodes, the first one is the English one (node 1) and the second one is e.g. the Spanish translation (node/2).

So the proper path to access those nodes are: en/node/1 and es/node/2. However, I can also go to es/node/1 and en/node/2, which will display the nodes as it is but the interface language will be different. This doesn't really make sense, because node/1 is an English content but you can view it with Spanish interface (the title, links, descriptions etc are all in Spanish).

There should be a setting to turn off this unneeded pages. It is also bad for SEO because search engines will regard es/node/1 and en/node/1 as duplicate content.

(this is also discussed a little bit here: http://drupal.org/node/67767 )

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

I'd like to second this issue. Right now this is preventing me from using the i18n module on my site.

scb’s picture

The problem is that the whole nodes need to be duplicated in order to be translated, and this is not optimal. This also leads to duplicating content that should not be duplicated, like images.
I have a CCK content type that has two imagefields. If I want it to be multilingual, both images have to be re-uploaded for each translation of the original node!

There should be a single copy of the node, whose (relevant) fields are somehow associated with their translations. So that en/node/1 would be english version and es/node/1 spanish, etc. This way there would be no SEO problems, and no path/pathauto problems, no content replication etc.

This wouldn't be easily done, though.

Leonth’s picture

#2: Your problem about images is not the problem of i18n, rather it is a misfeature of upload.module - upload.module should have the ability to specify links to already uploaded files from other nodes.

Implementation of this issue should be simple... just return 404 Not Found when interface lang and post lang don't match. I think there is already an option for that in i18n settings page, but it didn't work.

Jose Reyero’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

This 'separation of interface and content language' is actually a feature of the module.

In addition to that there's a setting in translation module that is 'interface language depends on content' for not having this 'mixed' pages.

binhcan’s picture

Version: 4.7.x-1.x-dev » 6.x-1.x-dev
Category: feature » support

I'm facing this issue too in 6.x The problem get worse because Google is indexing the untranslated node in the other language prefix... causing duplicated content.

Seriously guys, please fix it.

/en/some-page
should not be available at
/de/node/2

In other words, you could please redirect the /node/x to the proper language it belong to.

aww’s picture

I've had to add "Disallow: /es/" on my robots.txt file hoping to fix this issue. The downside is that my genuine 'es' pages will not be indexed.