JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.
Going multilingual
When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.
At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.
The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.
We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
