The experience I had building multilingual sites in Drupal 7. Special thanks to Suzanne Kennedy for allowing me to use some of the content from her presentations at DrupalCon Denver 2012 and DrupalCon Munich 2012.

2. 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

3. Drupal at UWA
 News System
 Information Services Suggestions System
 Trialling CiviCRM

6. Why I needed to create a
Multilingual Experience ?
 My Wedding – becandyoni.com
 The User Experience:
 reaching the target audience in their language

7. Why Multilingual?
 Reach a wider audience
 Expand to new markets
 Improve usability
 Search engine optimization
 Government regulations
 Company policy

8. 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?

10. What is Multilingual in
Drupal?
Type of Site Core Modules Contributed Explanation
Modules
Foreign- Locale Install Drupal in a
language site foreign language
Multilingual site Locale i18n User Interface and
Each node in a
different language
Menus & Blocks
Translated
Multilingual site Locale i18n + Entity Introduce Content
+ Translations Translation Translation
or Content e.g About Us
Translation

11. What comes with core?
 Locale - Adds language handling functionality
and enables the translation of the user interface
to languages other than English

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

16. Fully Symmetric Experience

18. Asymmetric Experience

19. 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

20. 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

23. Right to Left Languages

25. Types of Text

27. 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?

28. Content Translation
Workflow

29. Creating a Translation
Workflow from Scratch
 Permissions for translators
 Rules and Flag to trigger translation requests
 Views for Translators

30. Permissions for
Translation
 Node-Level Translation: Translators need to be
able to create content
 Field-Level Translation: Permissions to edit the
entity

31. Typical UI for Translators

32. Challenges
 Different UI for Entity Translation/Content
Translation is confusing
 Professional translators need to learn Drupal
 Need to build system for reviewing translations

33. Demo
 Enabling Locale Module
 Add Language (Language Name or Custom)
 Detection and Selection
 Enabling i18n module

34. Demo – Enabling
Language Support
1. Content Types > Basic Page > Translate > Edit
2. Publishing Options – Enabled, with translation
3. Save
4. Multilingual Settings
 Require language
 Normal

35. Acknowledgement
 Suzanne Kennedy’s presentations in:
 DrupalCon Denver - denver2012.drupal.org
 DrupalCon Munich - munich2012.drupal.org