Learning

How To Build A Multilingual Website Using Drupal

Lakshya Sharma September 26, 2023 0 3 min read

Drupal is a powerful content management system that allows you to create multi-language websites easily. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up Drupal for multilingual support, configure it for your language needs, and use the Translation module in Drupal 8 to manage translations. We’ll also take a look at how to test your languages and save them permanently so they’re available when you revisit your site later on.

Table of Contents

Introduction

This article is an introduction to Drupal and how you can use it to build a multilingual website. If you are new to Drupal, then this article will help you understand what Drupal is and how it can be used for your web development needs.

If you already know about Drupal and want to know more about creating multilingual websites using Drupal, then this guide will give you all the information that is necessary for building such websites with ease.

Creating a Multilingual Website

Drupal is a content management system (CMS), which means that it helps you organize and manage your website’s content. Drupal is also free, open-source software that you can use to build any kind of website.

It’s important to note that Drupal does not have its own language; it supports more than twenty different languages out-of-the-box, including English, Spanish, and French!

Configuring Drupal for Multilingual Support

Install the Multilingual Support module.
Configure Drupal to use the system language you want (English) as its default language.
Add additional languages and translations through Configuration > Regional & Language > Languages, where you can add new languages, configure them with a translation interface, and assign them to content types as needed.

Translating Content

You can translate content using the translation module, or you can use the translation interface.

The translation module allows you to translate individual pieces of content, such as articles and blog posts. You can also use it to create new languages for your website by adding them in the settings panel.
The translation interface is used when there is no need for a specific piece of content (such as an article) to be translated into another language; instead, all pages on your site will be translated automatically when they’re requested by users who speak different mother tongues.

Using the Translation Module to Manage Translations

To translate content, you must first create a translation. To do so, go to Structure > Translations and click Add Translation.

The next step is to add the source language for your translation (i.e., English). In this example, we will use English as our source language because it’s what we’ve used throughout our site thus far.

Once you’ve added an English translation of your content, Drupal will automatically create another version of each piece of content with its own unique slug and title that identifies it as being in Spanish (or whatever other languages are included in this particular set). You can see this reflected in their URLs: http://example.com/es/node/12345678901234567890 vs http://example.com/en_US/node/12345678901234567890

Testing and Saving Your Languages

Now that you have created the language versions of your website, it’s time to test them out.

To check that everything is working as expected, go through these steps:

Check that all text is translated correctly; for example, make sure that dates aren’t showing up in another language or that currency symbols are correct for each region (e.g., $ vs. €).
Check that links still work when clicked on from different regions; if they don’t work anymore then this could be because Drupal has not detected which language the user is viewing in yet (it doesn’t know what country they’re in), so it will show them their own version instead of yours! This can be fixed by adding some code into your settings page (see below).

Drupal is a powerful content management system that allows you to create multi-language websites easily.

Drupal is a powerful content management system that allows you to create multi-language websites easily. You can translate your website into multiple languages and then use the translation module to manage translations.

You can test and save your languages as well as see which language is currently selected in the interface of Drupal.

Conclusion

Drupal is a powerful content management system that allows you to create multi-language websites easily. It comes with built-in support for translating content, as well as tools that make it easy to manage translations across your site. You can also use third-party modules such as Language Switcher (available from the Drupal Module Repository) which will allow your users to switch between languages without having to reload pages or navigate away from their current location on your site.