An overview of building multilingual websites in Drupal.

1. Building Multilingual Websites With
Drupal
Sam Murray / Developer, Cogapp
DrupalCamp Brighton 2015
0

2. What we'll cover
Context - sites we've worked on at Cogapp over the last few years
Why multilingual websites?
Drupal 7 - multilingual out of the box
Content translation vs. Entity translation
Useful modules
Right-to-Left scripts
Drupal 8

3. Cogapp +
Multilingual Drupal

4. Qatar Digital Library

5. Qatar Digital Library

6. Qatar Museums

7. Qatar Museums

8. Kubota Collection

9. Kubota Collection

10. Relate: What's Next?

11. Relate: What's Next?

12. App Publisher
English
French
German
Chinese (Simplified)
Hebrew
and more...

13. Why multilingual
websites?

14. Non-English speaking web users
~75% web content was English in 1998
Now roughly 30%
Arabic web users:
Fastest increase in top 10 languages of the net
2000: 2,560,337 users
2013: 135,610,819 users
> 10x faster than increase in English speakers online
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

15. Language extinction
Only 5% of the world's languages represented online
Unesco: up to half of the world's languages extinct by the end of the century
Diverse web prevents cultural and economic hegemony and inequality
Vannini L., Le Crosnier H. Net.Lang: Towards The Multilingual Cyberspace. C&F Éditions: Caen, France.
2012

16. Multilingual Drupal

17. Locale module (core)
Add languages to your site
Translate the Drupal interface
Language detection and selection
URL format (fr.example.com or example.com/fr)

18. Language installation interface

19. Interface translation
<?php t('This is translatable'); ?>
<?php t('My name is @name', array('@name' => $name)); ?>

20. Content Translation (core)
Associate a node with a language
Relate translations of content to each other

21. Content translation
vs. Entity translation

22. Content translation
Core module in Drupal 6 and 7; not in Drupal 8
Provides ability for you to translate nodes
Each translation of a node is a node in itself
Pro: easier for language site to differ
Con: only nodes are translatable

23. Enable translation on a content type

24. Entity translation
Contrib module in Drupal 7 (beta); core in Drupal 8
Provides ability for you to translate fieldable entities
Define which fields can be translated
Pro: far more can be translated
Pro: core support in D8
Con: D7 core search and revisions not supported
Con: D7 all translations must be provided before any can be pubished
Con: D7 properties can't be translated
global $language; // Site language
global $language_content; // Content language
$entity->field_body['fr'][0]['value'];
$entity->field_body[$language->language][0]['value'];
$entity->field_body[$language_content->language][0]['value'];
$emw->field_body->value(); // Uses $language (site language)

25. Enable translation on a content type

26. Enable translation on a field

27. Adding a translation (Arabic)

28. Entity translation interface

29. Choose a method and stick with it

30. Handy modules

31. Internationalization modules (i18n,
i18n_*)
Extends multilingual support in Drupal 6 + 7
Taxonomy translation
Multilingual blocks
Multilingual variables
Some overlaps with Entity Translation module, but the 2 work together

32. Localization client
On-page interface translation

33. Gotchas

34. Gotchas
Content editing when site language != content language (e.g. entity
references)
Menu translation - various methods, none perfect
Fonts (particurly webfonts) - do they have all of the characters you need?
Including bold? Including light? .ttf? .svg? .eot?

35. Right-to-Left scripts

36. LTR / RTL
Lorem ipsum... ----->
<----- ...‫ﺃأﻱي‬ ‫ﻭوﻗﺎﻡم‬ ‫ﻳﯾﺫذﻛﺭر‬

37. RTL Scripts/Languages
Arabic Script ==> Arabic, Persian, Urdu
Hebrew Script ==> Hebrew, Yiddish
Thaana Script ==> Dhivehi (Maldives)
Syriac Script ==> Syriac (ancient Aramaic language)

38. Arabic
Basic alphabet = 28 characters
Eastern Arabic numbers - Left-to-Right!
Caseless
Italics = :(
Some punctuation marks are different
Comma = ،٬
Question mark = ‫؟‬
Mostly uses the same punctuation marks used in English

39. RTL on the web
HTML 'dir' attribute
<html dir="rtl"></html>
<p dir="ltr"></p>
CSS 'direction' property
CSS 'unicode-bidi' property
div {
direction:rtl;
unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
}
Unicode left-to-right mark - HTML &lrm;
Unicode right-to-left mark - HTML &rlm;
These go before a character to specify where it should be placed in
relation to the previous character

40. Problems with bi-directionality
Some "English" ‫ﺃأﻱي‬ ‫ﻭوﻗﺎﻡم‬ ‫ﻳﯾﺫذﻛﺭر‬
<p dir="ltr">Some "English" ‫أي‬ ‫وﻗﺎم‬ ‫/<ﻳﺬﻛﺮ‬p>
‫ﺃأﻱي‬ ‫ﻭوﻗﺎﻡم‬ ‫ﻳﯾﺫذﻛﺭر‬ "Some "English
<p dir="rtl">Some "English" ‫أي‬ ‫وﻗﺎم‬ ‫/<ﻳﺬﻛﺮ‬p>

41. Drupal 8

42. Drupal 8
Content translation is obsolete
Entity translation out of the box
Much wider support for translation across the different Drupal elements
4 core modules
http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/