1. Multilingual Content
in Drupal 7 and 8

2. About Me
Co-founder of Evolving Web
Training, Development, Consulting
evolvingweb.ca
@suzanne_kennedy

3. Multilingual Drupal Training
evolvingweb.ca/training

4. Multilingual Content
in Drupal 7 and 8
1. Getting Started
• Multilingual Requirements 3. Content Translation Workflows
• What is Multilingual Drupal? • Why it’s Important
• Types of Drupal Text • Translation Management Tool
2. Translating Content 4. What’s Next?
• The Lifecycle of Drupal • Challenges in Drupal 7
Content Multilingual
• Translation Methods • Learn More & Contribute
• Planning Multilingual Content

5. Multilingual
Requirements

6. Why Multilingual?
• Reach a wider audience
• Expand to new markets
• Improve usability
• Search engine optimization
• Government regulations
• Company policy

7. Multilingual Resources
Personnel Resources
• User-Interface Translators • Contributed Translations
(localize.drupal.og)
• Content Translators
• Machine Translation
• QA for each Language
• Translation Manager

8. Internationalization
• aka i18n
• Developing a website that enables localization
of content and other elements.
• Separating elements that should be localized
so they can be specified for each locale.

9. Localization
• aka l10n
• Process of adapting a website for a certain
locale including:
• Translation of text and graphics
• Numeric, date and time formats
• Currency
• Time zones
• Legal requirements

10. What kind of site are you
building?
• How many languages do you need to support?
• Does the user interface need to be fully
translated?
• Do you have content in all languages? Is all the
content translated?
• What happens to untranslated content?

11. What is Multilingual
Drupal?

12. Foreign-language site

13. Multilingual Site

14. Multilingual Site with
Translation

15. Multilingual Modules
• Core:
• Locale
• Content Translation
• Contrib:
• i18n (Internationalization)
• Entity Translation

16. Types of Text in Drupal

17. Types of Text
Content
User interface (Code)
i18n Strings
Variables
User interface (User-Defined)

18. Built-in interface (Code)
Translation Interfaces Built-in interface (User-Defined)
in Drupal i18n Strings
i18n Strings
Variables Content

19. Types of Text
Content
Built-in interface (Code)
i18n Strings
Variables
Built-in interface (User-Defined)

20. Multilingual Content

21. What content
experience are you
building?

22. Fully Symmetric Experience
English Poilsh

23. Asymmetric Experience
French English

24. What about
untranslated content?

25. Show Untranslated Content

26. Hide Untranslated Content
French English

27. Content Translation
Methods

28. Content Translation
Methods
Node-Level Translation Field-Level Translation
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 1
(English) (French) (German)
Title Title Title Title Title Title
(English) (French) (German) (English) (French) (German)
Image Image Image Image

29. Node-Level Translation

30. Node-Level Translation
• Content Translation module (Drupal core)
• New node for each translation
• Nodes are mapped together in a translation
set

31. Translating Nodes
Translation Set
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3
(English) (French) (German)
tnid = 1 tnid = 1 tnid = 1
Title Title Image Title Image
Image
(English) (French) (German)

32. Benefits of Node-Level
Translation
• Asymmetric menus per language
• Language-specific features (flagging, sign-up,
moderation)
• Curation of content per language
• Works for node-based functionality (i.e. search)
• Use built-in ‘Flag as translation needs update’

33. Drawbacks of Node-Level
Translation
• Everything is language-specific by default
• Need to ‘synchronize’ data between nodes
• Too many nodes
• Doesn’t work for modelling language-neutral
things (groups of people, products, data)
• Only works for nodes

34. Translating a Node

35. Language-Specific
Properties

36. Properties per Translation
Translation Set
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3
(English) (French) (German)
tnid = 1 tnid = 1 tnid = 1
Title Title Image Title Image
Image
(English) (French) (German)
Menu Published Menu Published Menu Published
Settings Date Settings Date Settings Date

37. Field-Level Translation

38. Field-Level Translation
• Entity Translation module (contrib) provides
the UI
• Translation of fields instead of nodes
• Fields are translatable in core

39. Translating Fields
Node 1
Language-Specific Fields Language Independent
Title Title Title
Image Author
(English) (French) (German)
Body Body Body Facebook
Post Date
(English) (French) (German) Likes
A single node, with translations of certain
fields.

40. Language-Independent
Properties
• Flags • Entity references
• Voting Data • Panels nodes’ layout
• Signups • Content Access
• Nodequeue or • Social Media
Draggable Views Data Integration (Add This)
• Moderation /
Scheduler settings

41. Benefits of Field-Level
Translation
• Better model for language-neutral content:
• No need to sync properties
• 1 node ID
• Works with all kinds of entities:
• Taxonomy terms, users, etc.
• It’s the future!

42. Drawbacks of Field-Level
Translating
• Doesn’t work with core search or revisions
• Different UI for translators to learn
• Not compatible with node options or
multilingual select features from i18n
• Doesn’t work with ‘Flag as needs translation
update’
• Properties can’t be translated

43. Setting up Field Translation
for a Content Type

44. Setting up Field Translation

45. Translating the Title
drupal.org/project/title

46. Field Translation UI

47. Field Translation UI

48. Examples: Field vs.
Node-Level Translation

49. Example: Conference Session

50. Example: Carousel Item

51. Example: Webform

52. Content Translation
Methods
Node-Level Translation Field-Level Translation
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3
Node 1
(English) (French) (German)
Title Title Title Title Title Title
(English) (French) (German) (English) (French) (German)
Image Image Image Image

53. Life-cycle of a node
Published
Node Creation
Node 1
CSV User ‘Likes’
Node 1
x
the Node
Unpublished Node 1 Node 1
Node 1
Deleted
Node 1
Node 1
+ Comment Node 1
Flag as Offensive
Update

54. Field vs. Node Translation:
Conclusion
• Field-level translation is the right data model for
most use cases
• Will be default method for D8 core
• You can use it today on D7, but only if you’re
not afraid to get your hands dirty

55. Translating Other Entity
Types

56. Translate Core Entities
Translation of entities from core modules

57. Translate Users
Configure Fields Translate Users
Permissions

58. Translate Users:
Use Cases
• Team member profiles
• Multilingual community site
• Users who offer a service to users in more than
one language

59. Translate Users:
Drawbacks
• Single permission for users (can translate any
user entity)
• UI is not self-explanatory

60. Translate Terms
Configure Fields Translate Terms
Permissions

61. Translate Terms:
Use Cases
• Any vocabulary that is symmetric across
languages:
• Categories
• Destinations
• Medical Topics

62. Translate Terms:
Drawbacks
• Time-consuming to use translation UI
• Single permission for translating all
vocabularies
• Alphabetical listings in Views will use source
language

63. Translate Comments
Configure Fields Translate Comments
Permissions

64. Translate Comments:
Use Cases
• Travel website (machine translation of reviews)
• Government website (human translation of
questions + answers)

65. Translate Other Entities
Translation of entities from contributed modules
Entities need to
have fields and
include translation
support in
hook_entity_info()

66. Commerce Product Entity
Language-specific Language-neutral
• Title • SKU
• Description • Status
• URL • Image
• Price
• Quantity
Remaining
• Shopping Cart
Status

67. Commerce Product Entity

68. Commerce Product Entity

69. Commerce Product Entity

70. Content Translation
Workflows

71. Cost of Translation
• Time-consuming
• Expensive
• How can you speed up the process and
reduce the amount of text to be translated?

72. Content Translation
Workflow
1. Author creates a new node 2. Translator adds a translation
Author Translator

73. Creating a Translation
Workflow from Scratch
• Permissions for translators
• Rules and Flag to trigger translation requests
• Views for Translators

74. Permissions for Translation
• Node-Level Translation: Translators need to be
able to create content
• Field-Level Translation: Permission to edit the
entity
• No granular translation permissions per
content type by default (use i18n_access)

75. Typical UI for Translators
Permissions
Rules
Views

76. Challenges
• Different UI for Entity Translation/Content
Translation (Confusing)
• Professional translators need to learn Drupal
• Need to build system for reviewing translations

77. Translation Workflows
for Content:
TMGMT Module

78. Translation Management
Tool (TMGMT)
drupal.org/project/tmgmt

79. Translation Management
Tool (TMGMT)
Drupal

80. Translators
• Microsoft (Bing) Translator (machine)
• Google Translate (machine)
• Nativy (human)
• MyGengo (human)
• Supertext (human)
• One Hour Translation (human)

81. Microsoft Translator

82. Microsoft Translator

83. Requesting Translations

84. Requesting Translations

85. Review Translation

86. Review Translation

87. Translate in Bulk

88. Benefits of TMGMT
• Field-level and node-level translation
• Also translate i18n strings (in development)
• Easy to configure
• Human/machine translator plugins
• Write your own translator plugin

89. Challenges in Drupal 7
• Choosing a content translation method
• Permissions for Translators
• Choosing contributed modules
• Translating custom elements (Webforms)
• Improve Translation UI
• Building translation workflows in Drupal

90. Looking Forward to D8
• Translatable properties
• More things are entities
• Better UI for adding/configuring languages
• Come to Gábor’s Core Conversation tomorrow

91. Contrib Modules for Entity
Translation
• Entity Translation Feeds (et_feeds)
• Search API Entity Translation (search_api_et)