Drupal is “walking the talk.” Yes, we’re on track and working hard for a multilingual Drupal 6. We’ve already done a lot of important work, and it would be great if some more people could test the current codebase (svn repository) and give us some feedback on how it works. You can post your comments here or on the issue tracker.

We have most of the multilingual nodes implemented, which was our latest core patch, as well as a translation module that handles content translations, which might be the next one. We’re working on some other important features here.

In addition to all this, we’ve been working on existing Drupal 5 modules (more on that later) and looking at how we can make an easy upgrade path to Drupal 6 so current sites with multilingual Drupal installations won’t be left behind.

We’ve created a new "multilingual modules" category that already has six modules listed to group existing and future related modules. Roberto Gerola and I will collaborate to improve the compatibility of current multilingual solutions, localizer, and internationalization, and will share our efforts and work to make the upgrade to Drupal 6 easier. We’re also considering spinning off some modules from the main *huge* package so they can be shared and smoothing compatibility issues to allow other contributed modules to work with both options.

In more related news, Gábor Hojtsy is a new Drupal core committer and will be a co-maintainer of the DRUPAL-6 branch. Congratulations Gábor!

All and all, we still have some important work to do, but at this point I really think Drupal's future looks... multilingual!... which is just one more necessary step to World Domination ;)