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.
Drupalize.Me resources
Overview of languages and translation on a site.
Drupal 7
External resources
-
Drupal Multilingual guide (Drupal.org)
- The official community guide for multilingual tasks provides an overview of the various features.
-
Setting up a Multilingual Website with Drupal 8 (YouTube.com)
- Concise video that walks through creating a new Drupal 8 site with multilingual features.
-
Drupal 8 Multilingual Basics webinar (YouTube)
- A webinar that explains all of the Drupal multilingual features in Drupal 8.
-
DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Drupal 8 multilingual hands-on (YouTube)
- This video shows a demonstration of a multilingual site being built.
-
Migrating Multilingual sites to Drupal 8 (evolvingweb.com)
- This is a series of 4 blog posts about how to migrate an existing multilingual Drupal site (6 or 7) to Drupal 8. You should read these posts in conjunction with our Drupal Migration Guide.