Site Building
Topic

Multilingual Sites for Drupal 7, 8, 9, and 10

A multilingual site has more than 1 language that users interact with. Two common terms you will hear used with multilingual sites are internationalization, abbreviated as i18n, and localization, abbreviated as l10n. Internationalization is the underlying structure that allows software to be adapted to different languages, and localization is the process of actually translating the software for use by a specific locale.

In Drupal there are 4 main ways of working with language on your site. You can choose how much or how little of each you wish to use on your site.

  • Language: adding and choosing the languages
  • Interface Translation: text that is hard-coded into the website, like administrative interfaces from core and contributed modules. There is a large selection of community-contributed interface translations for core and contributed projects.
  • Content Translation: text that is created as an entity, like content types or users
  • Configuration Translation: text that is created by configuration settings, like the site name

Example tasks

  • Assign a language to a piece of content
  • Allow a user to change the site language
  • Translate content
  • Translate the website interface

Confidence

Multilingual is a stable core feature.

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