Drupal Translation

Update: I have created a step by step tutorial to add translation to a Drupal 7 site

Questions to ask when planning a site that is to be translated

  • What parts of the site will be translated 
  • Just the navigation 
  • Also the Static content (mixed mode) content that is not translated would just show in english
  • Choose to show or hide content that is not translated
  • Is the language is related to the region, for example if the currency and format options
  • Translation workflow, does content always start out as english
  • Does Drupal have fairly complete translations for the UI
  • What will be the default language for the site, (this is used as the language fall back for the site)
  • How will the language affect the design of the site.  Some languages take more space.
  • Do you fonts support all the languages you are using

Translating the User Interface

Select the varibles you would like to translate: site, slogan...

To translate these Varibles you must go to the site configuration page and select the language to provide the translation for.

Add Translations from the Translation interface page

Translating content

Because content is entered by users, we need to focus more on the translation experiance for those users.

Translating content can be done with two models

Node translation = each node is really multiple nodes that are linked to each other.  Works ok until you need to link nodes to each other.

Field Translation (enabled by the entity translation module)

Publishing options for a node has some options for translating its content

Enabled means that this piece of content can be in a langauge different than english (but only one language)  Select what language the content entered is.

Fields API supports the langauge code for each piece of field data.

Entity translations work for not just nodes, but also users, comments, taxonomy

Cannot translate: Author, promoted, dates, Title

You can install the title module to allow translation of the Node titles.  But in views you should use the replacement field: field_title insted of title.

Language Fallback

Enable i18n_menu, i18n_fields, 

Disable: i18n_select, i18n_taxonomy (because these conflict with entity translation)

Revisions don't work with Entity translation of content.  May be addressed in D8

Translating Everything Else

  • Blocks  - Block Translation module, shows on the Block interface, change the visability
  • Field settings - Field lable shows next to mange fields tab
  • Menu items - Menu Translation module (i18n)

Also, use the localization update module to update translations

Localization Client Module, alternative user innterface to the translation interface.

 

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