By blankoboy on

I am planning a site that will be multilingual (starting with English/Japanese) and am wondering how Drupal handles languages. I know that Vbulletin uses a phrase based system which pulls actual display text from language xml files. Does/can Drupal do the same or similar? Thanks.

Comments

mohammed76’s picture

mohammed76
Primary language English
Location Muscat
commented

hi.

when looking into how drupal handles language you should take a look at the core module locale. we translate interface using pot files that contain the original "english" strings and translate them into the target language strings. then we take the resulting .po file and import it using that locale module.

drupal has been translated into japanese already, take a look at the translation page
http://drupal.org/project/ja

the multilingual / bilingual translation of site content is handled by 1of the 2 contrib modules:
localizer or
internationalization

if japanese has another directionality other than ltr (left to right) then custumizing the theme becomes necessary

hope this is a useful guidance into where to start from

Mohammed al-shar'

Nattiq Technologies

Mohammed al-shar'

The Explorer

eriktoyra’s picture

eriktoyra commented

Blankoboy: I recomment you to use the Localizer module for what you need. The simple administration of the module when it comes to translation and managing the structure and navigation of the site makes it better than Internationalization.