Want an easy way to extend your market reach and ultimately your sales? Do you feel you need to personalize your website to every user no matter which country they belong to or what language they speak? Getting yourself a multilingual website is your best bet. Not only is it a more cost-effective marketing strategy, it also helps in increasing your website traffic and overall SEO. Drupal CMS has particularly taken up this challenge of providing not only users but also developers with the ability to access Drupal in a language that they prefer. And with Drupal 8 being multilingual out-of-the-box, it has become an ideal choice for businesses and developers. Powerful Drupal translation modules offer developers with granular configuration capabilities where every content entity can be translated.
What are Multilingual Websites?
Multilingual basically means written or available in different languages. Multilingual websites connect better with users from different countries as it immediately adds an element of familiarity. Drupal 8 provides an easy and a great experience of building a multilingual website. Currently Drupal 8 supports 100 different languages for translation.
Drupal 8 has a multilingual feature which comes along with the installation interface. As soon as you install Drupal, based on the browser preference, it provides a language for your Drupal website. Based on the option selected the site is installed in that particular language. Drupal 8 basically provides 4 different modules for language and content translation. We can enable the required Drupal modules in our site and use according to our needs in the website.
The four core modules provided by drupal are
- Language module
- Content translation module
- Interface translation module
- Configuration translation module
Let’s catch up with what each module does, its configurations and how each module can be used in our Drupal website.
Firstly, you need to enable all the 4 core modules in your drupal site. All the translation modules can be configured at path /admin/config/regional
Drupal Language Module
This Drupal 8 language module is one of the core modules located at core/modules/language. It provides a feature of adding and choosing a new language to your Drupal website. Under /admin/config/regional/language/ you can simply add a new language to your site by clicking on the “Add Language” button. It provides a list of different languages from which you can choose the language you need for the development.
Choose the preferred language from the list and add it
Once the language is added the interface will look similar to this. In the above picture, the default language of the interface is set as English and spanish is the additional language installed. The 9172/9340(98.2%) under Interface translation indicates that 9172 words out of 9340 words available for translation are translated i.e 98.2% of the words in the interface are translated.
It also provides a block( Language switcher) to switch the language from one to another which can be placed at any region of your Drupal website. Under /admin/structure/block we can place the language switcher block with which we can switch the default language of our website.
Once the block is placed in the region we will be able to switch to the different languages in the web page itself.
Content Translation Module
The Drupal Content Translation module allows you to translate content entities such as comments, custom block, contents, taxonomy terms, users etc. In order to translate the content entities, the website should have at least two languages installed. The content translation can be configured at path admin/config/regional/content-language . It provides a list of entity types which can be translated.
For example, click on the content configuration option that appears for each content type.
Let us consider that the content translation is being enabled for the article content type. It provides an option to decide if each subtype entity to be translatable or not. We can also change the default language for a particular content type. Each field has an option to translate its content or not.
It also provides an option to input the content in the language which is suitable for the user while adding content from the backend interface. Once the above configuration is set up and when we try to add content to the Article content type we can see a Select option with the languages installed in our site. We can select any language and add content in the particular language selected.
Once the contents are saved, users with translate permissions will see links to Translate its content. It provides an additional tab called “Translate” along with the "Edit" links, and you'll be able to add translations for each configured language.
Content Translation Module - Select the language
Interface translation Module
The Drupal Interface translation module is also a part of core module and can be easily enabled like any other drupal module. Once this module is enabled it is possible to replace any string in the interface with string which has been customized. Whenever this module encounters any string it tries to translate the particular string to the current language of the interface. If a particular translation is not available it is remembered and we can lookup into the untranslated string in the table.
In the above example, the strings which are both translated and untranslated are displayed and we are able to modify the strings for the language that is installed as well.
The translations for the strings are put up in a single place called http://localize.drupal.org and the Localization Update module will automatically import the updated translation strings for your selected language. In Drupal 7 and previous versions, this was a contributed module. In Drupal 8 it is a part of a core module.
Configuration translation Module
The Drupal 8 Configuration Translation module allows configuration to be translated into different languages. The site name, views name, and other configurations can be translated easily using the configuration translation.
