By userbill on

Hi,

I'm very new to Drupal, and I need to create a website for a client. They want to use CMS for a few reasons. First of all the site will need to be translated into multiple languages. Second, they will need to update a few items, such as news articles.

For the most part, it is static site. I've played around with some of the internationalization modules, and it seems that Drupal handles the translations nicely. What I'm having trouble with is creating the site itself.

Ultimately, what I would like to do is give the user (translator) a block of text and allow them to translate it without having to deal with or even see any html. Is it possible to do that using Drupal? And if so, can somebody please point me in the right direction? I've been stumbling around trying to figure out how to do this.

Thank you.

Bill

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

How is that text to be used after it is translated? On site or off site? And if on site, where/how?

userbill’s picture

userbill commented

I don't know exactly what you are asking. It is a static site. There will be a French version, German version, etc... I don't know how many languages they are going to translate it into. It is simply an informational website. Once it is translated, it will probably never be touched ever again. They may update the news blurbs on the front page, but other than that, it is a static site. They want to be able to translate the English version that we make for them into at least 3 other languages.

I think Drupal might be overkill for what they want. I don't know if I'm trying to drive a square peg into a round hole here, which is why I'm posting this question here.

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

The translation system for Drupal is all done through the admin interface, none of it is done by editing files. So the answer to your question is yes, they can do the translation without ever having to touch any html.

What you are translating will determine the method of translating it. If you are translating content, then you can set it up so that when editing the content, there is a 'translate' tab that you click to add translations. If you are translating the interface, then you can use the l10n_client module to add translations directly to the page you are looking at. Note that translation in Drupal is not for the faint of heart, you will end up having a lot of head scratching moments where you cannot figure out how to translate a given item. I've done it on multiple sites, and I still run into this regularly.

userbill’s picture

userbill commented

Thanks. I've gotten a decent translation system set up on a fresh Drupal install, where it had tabs to translate content etc.. The real difficulty i"m having is setting up Drupal itself so that I can break everything up into translatable chunks. I've investigated some other, simpler systems, and I think I will go with one of those. I think for a static site like this, that does not fit into a nice pre-defined template, Drupal will be too unwieldy for a novice like myself. I've found a system that lets you define any chunk of html as editable and for what I'm doing, I think that is the way to go. Thanks for your input though!

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

No problem! Drupal is quite complex with a steep learning curve, so if your system does not need that much functionality to it, you likely are making a good decision using a different system this time.