Building Multilingual

Sites in Drupal 7

Yoni Steingiesser

About Me

Senior Web Coordinator at Information Services at the University of WA

Founder of Stemaco Technology

UX Design, Consulting, Drupal

stemaco.com.au

Twitter: @stemaco

Drupal at UWA

News System

Information Services Suggestions System

Trialling CiviCRM

Why I needed to create a Multilingual Experience ? My Wedding – becandyoni.com

The User Experience:

reaching the target audience in their language

Why Multilingual?

Reach a wider audience

Expand to new markets

Improve usability

Search engine optimization

Government regulations

Company policy

Things to consider when building multilingual sites How many languages do you need to support?

Does the user interface need to be fully translated?

Do you have content in all the languages? Is all the content translated?

What happens to content that has not been translated?

What is Multilingual

Drupal?

What is Multilingual in Drupal?

Type of Site Core Modules Contributed Modules

Explanation

Foreign-language site

Locale Install Drupal in a foreign language

Multilingual site Locale i18n User Interface and Each node in a different language Menus & Blocks Translated

Multilingual site + Translations

Locale i18n + Entity Translation or Content Translation

Introduce Content Translation e.g About Us

What comes with core?

Locale - Adds language handling functionality and enables the translation of the user interface to languages other than English

Internationalization

i18n - drupal.org/project/i18n

Developing a website that enables localization of content and other elements

Separating elements that should be localized so they can be specified for each locale

Localization

l10n

Process of adapting a website for a certain locale including:

Translation of text and graphics

Numeric, date and time formats

Currency

Time zones

Legal requirements

Localized Drupal Distribution to install Drupal with user interface translations pulled automatically from localize.drupal.org

Other Contributed Modules I used Entity Translation – Allows (fieldable)

entities to be translated into different languages, by introducing entity/field translation

Language Icons – provides icons for language links

What content experience

are you building?

Fully Symmetric Experience

Asymmetric Experience

What about untranslated content? You can either show it in the language where

you have the content for all languages

OR Hide the untranslated content

Content Translation Methods Node-Level Translations

Field-Level Translation

Other Entity Types

Core Entities e.g Comments, Taxonomy terms, Users

Entities from contributed modules e.g Commerce Product Entities

How will Language Affect

the Design?

Right to Left Languages

What Type of Text are

you Translating?

Types of Text

Content Translation

Workflows

Cost of Translation

Time-consuming

UX – Context, local awareness, jargon etc

Expensive

How can you speed up the process and reduce the amount of text to be translated?

Content Translation Workflow

Creating a Translation Workflow from Scratch Permissions for translators

Rules and Flag to trigger translation requests

Views for Translators

Permissions for Translation Node-Level Translation: Translators need to be

able to create content

Field-Level Translation: Permissions to edit the entity

Typical UI for Translators

Challenges

Different UI for Entity Translation/Content Translation is confusing

Professional translators need to learn Drupal

Need to build system for reviewing translations

Demo

Enabling Locale Module

Add Language (Language Name or Custom)

Detection and Selection

Enabling i18n module

Demo – Enabling Language Support1. Content Types > Basic Page > Translate > Edit

2. Publishing Options – Enabled, with translation

3. Save

4. Multilingual Settings

Require language

Normal

Acknowledgement

Suzanne Kennedy’s presentations in:

DrupalCon Denver - denver2012.drupal.org

DrupalCon Munich - munich2012.drupal.org