Multilingual Development Or Support For Drupal Development

By Author: Dharmesh Aegis
Total Articles: 105
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Drupal is an open source CMS that can be used to develop a variety of websites from personal to corporate. Drupal developers use it to save time and money for their drupal development. There are thousands of companies providing offshore drupal development because of its rich features and economic qualities. Drupal Developers are well aware that drupal consists of user interface in English flavor. If you need to translate it for drupal development needs then you require entering your language. Let us see in more details.
Drupal developers need to configure the website to support more than a single language. Drupal offers two core modules for translating:
The first one is Locale module which is for user interface elements (built-in system strings such as menu items, form labels, help text, and button labels such as 'Log in', 'Logout', 'Submit', 'View', 'Edit', 'Delete' etc.)
The second one is Content translation module which is used for content of the website (created pages by actual user, stories, blocks, etc.)
For extending the functionality of these modules you can do it with contributed modules for ...
... language and locale. Read the related documentation for understanding proper multilingual menu system and blocks and then install Internationalization module. Those looking for a quick start can refer to a tutorial called "Basic Internationalization setup". With the help of Localization update module you can automatically translate discoveries and updates. The alternate option is of manually importing existing translation via the administration interface:
Drupal 6: Administer > Site Building > Translate Interface > Import(example.com/admin/build/translate/import)
Drupal 7: Configuration > Regional and language > Translate Interface > Import(example.com/admin/config/regional/translate/import)
There is an install profile called Localized Drupal which allows quick installation of an already localized version of Drupal (it supports over 80 languages). Refer localize.drupal.org for translations for Drupal core, themes and modules. In order to contribute localized versions of Drupal see Translate Drupal to your language in the Getting Involved Guide.
There are three types of data that needs to be translated in Drupal development and they are:
User Interface
Content
Configuration
The most extensive support for which Drupal offers is that of translating user interface. Then comes the support for content translation which is good but configuration support cannot be called so good. Let's see what Drupal offers for each one:
Interface translation: User interface is something that cannot be edited by the user and it is whatever text that is included in the module/theme. It is assumed that user interface is written in English. Drupal Localization API documentation on drupal.org offers extensive coverage with cheat sheets for translation.
Translatable content: Drupal 7 offer the key to use entities and fields for content. Fields have in-built language support and it depends on user whether a field is multiplied per language and can store different values or just share it among various languages.
Translatable configuration: Configuration is something that is not hardcode text in your modules and is not stored in either fields or entities. It has a defining characteristic of having a user interface for editing the values.

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