Web Design and Development Edinburgh Scotland UK - Drupal, Ubercart, Themes, Modules, Open Source - il8n (internationalization) and l10n (localization) features in Drupal 6

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il8n (internationalization) and l10n (localization) features in Drupal 6

A good friend of mine is getting married soon and have asked me to setup a small private site for them so they can make announcements and invitations to special friends and families. A photo gallery will be added later for invited guests and others that may not make it to the wedding party to view. I chose to use Drupal 6 as the site doesn't require any modules that hasn't been updated as yet and with the granular role permissions i can protect the whole site and only allow certain users access.

The site was also to be in English and German. This was easily achieved as Drupal 6 has a built-in feature for translating the interface and contents. It work really well however, after some time trying to make the whole site (not just parts of it) translated i realised the limitations i was faced with, as outline below:

Lack of translation files to download. Even German, a popular language wasn't yet been translated for D6
Translating content was easy and very intuitive but there was no way of translating other things (ie, menu items, tags and vocabularies) other than contents types such as page or story
Creating a content type each different language actually creates two version of the same content and Drupal doesn't understand that both are of the same (only in different languages)

There is a module that can help ease the translation process for the admin interface and that is to use the localisation module. This module helps to bring up all the text that are translatable from the interface so you can add your own translation to it.

If you're up a for real challenge, you could try our il8n module by Development Seed. It's also well worth a visit to their site just to witness a beautiful design (it has a clever use of tabs in the solutions page).

Having said some of the negative aspects of the built-in translator in D6, i still think it's a good effort since this is a real complicated tasks to accomplice. I think the real solution and probably the only solution is to run a multisite environment. Even if in the near future, if everything can be translated via admin panel it would only add more complications to an already fully rich abundant of administration features in Drupal. What about machine translation, forget it...