Internationalization (D7)

Last updated on
6 October 2020
This page is outdated. For more up to date Drupal 8 plans, see http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-initiatives

Work is underway to bring even more multilingual and multinational support into Drupal core.

Here are some priority issues you can help with:

Some priority new development

A top priority in the sprint is to code up a solution or solutions for core to translate objects.

There are two leading contenders for how to do this. Likely we will work on both:

  • #367603: Object translation option #3: 'translatable' schema field attribute, parallel tables
    This approach would add schema information to tables and fields and provide automatic table creation and data handling based on these attributes. For example, the taxonomy term table's 'name' and 'description' fields would be marked 'translatable' in the schema. Locale module would automatically create a table with tid, name, description, and language fields. taxonomy_term_load_multiple() (or a locale rewrite of its queries) would load the translated name rather than the original one as needed.
  • #367595: Translatable fields
    This issue would take the new Fields API and add translation, such that every object that supported fields would get translation by default.

One or both of these solutions could be the basis for solving these outstanding needs:

Even if we have one or both of these solutions, though, we will still need a way to translate user-defined strings that aren't in the form of fields or direct object properties. Like variables (embedded in serialized data), menu items (already have a framework for translation, but no solution in core), etc.

Relevant issues:

Other issues we could tackle if there are enough interested people include:

Patches from old Patch Spotlight

Here are a couple patches moved over from the previous patch spotlight:

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