Using the i18n module in Drupal, it is possible to translate content to languages which you do not have enabled on the user interface. The term "orphaned language" is used because the content translation does not belong to a language that's enabled on the UI. For example, if you want your website navigation, footer, header, links, etc. to only be available in English, but you want to translate some articles/content to other languages than English, you can do this; the process is not so straightforward. The purpose of this page is to document the process. For more background information you can refer to XXXX (link to blog post), but please use this Drupal handbook page to get the latest, updated documentation (the documentation in the blog post will be maintained on this page).

Drupal 6 Extended/Orphaned language support

* Enable "content translation" and "locale"

* Enable the "internationalization" module which is a module that's part of http://drupal.org/project/i18n

* Go to admin/settings/language and add a language, for example, Spanish.

* After you add the language, you're back on admin/settings/language. From there, uncheck the "Enable" checkbox for that language in order to disable it as an option on the user interface.

* Click on the "Configure" tab - admin/settings/language/configure and select the "Path prefix only" for this example. You do not have to select "path prefix only" but we'll use it for this example.

* Then go to admin/content/types and click on "edit" for the content type you want to enable orphaned language translation

* Within the "Workflow settings" drop down you'll see the "Multilingual support" options. Select "Enabled, with translation." Then, from the same "Workflow settings" area, you'll see "Extended language support:" under which you should select "Extended - All defined languages will be allowed." Then save the page.

* Now, you can go make a page node, and set its language to English. Then, you'll see you'll be able to then translate that page to Spanish after you save it, even though Spanish is "disabled". Just click the "Translation" tab and create your translation, and save the page.

* After you save the translation and you're back on the node, switch back and forth between the English and the Spanish by clicking the respective link to that language. Notice that the path for the URL is not using /es/ ever. This is because the interface/locale stack is not switching when you switch the language.

* Now, if you go back and "enable" Spanish in the language/locale settings page, and then go back to this node and switch between English and Spanish, you'll notice that the interface also switches (you'll see this if you've translated any of the strings, otherwise, you'll just notice that the /es/ path is added to the URL when viewing the "Spanish" node), and therefore the language is no longer considered an "orphaned" language.

Drupal 5 Extended/Orphaned language support

The steps to make this happen on Drupal 5 are pretty much the same as Drupal 6, except for three differences:

* You must install the i18n "Internationalization" module and the i18n translation module (the i18n "translation" module is used instead of the "content translation" module which is Drupal 6 core only) as well as have the core locale module enabled. The latest stable release is fine for i18n.

* You do not have to configure anything on /admin/settings/language/configure as this does not exist in Drupal 5.

* Instead of "Enabled, with translation" on the admin/content/types/{CONTENT-TYPE-NAME} page, you will just need to select "Extended - All defined languages will be allowed" from that workflow fieldset.