Development Seed Blog

The next version of Drupal will make it much easier to build complex multilingual websites, and it will make it a whole lot easier to edit and maintain the sites too. One of the key changes is that it will be much easier to translate the instructions built into the backend of Drupal websites - called strings in Drupal speak, this refers to all the text you see in a typical CMS that tells you what content you’re looking at and what to do with it. (Note: This is currently in Drupal’s patch approval queue so it may not make it into the next release of Drupal core, but it will be available. Go give it a test run and give some feedback. It will make Jose, a lead developer, very happy.)

This may not seem like that big of deal, but it could really help streamline your editorial process. Say you have a bilingual website in French and English like Haiti Innovation and a site administrator that speaks only English. By default, the backend instructions are in English so your site admin will be able to edit the site easily in both languages. Then one day the boss comes in and decides that the website needs to also be in Creole to better represent the Haitian people. The web shop or your web guy set your site up to handle a third language, a French to Creole translator is lined up, and the site admin is told to make it happen. Now the site admin comes up with two ways to go about translating all the content into Creole – either copy and paste all the current French content into a Word document, send it to the translator, get someone to instruct the translator on what to do, have the translator send the document back, and then create all the pages over again in Creole. Or the site admin could let the translator go in and make the translations directly in website using the content management system. The second option sounds a lot easier doesn’t it? Too bad there’s a catch – all of the CMS instructions (and titles) are in English.

The way it works now in Drupal makes it difficult and time consuming to translate these instructions. You can to do them by hand one at a time or export them and edit them in a tool called a PO editor. So what happens is that because of the process many multilingual site admins never end up doing it and their CMS looks like this:

But really, you want something like this:

In the next version of Drupal, you’ll be able to translate these instructions easily and in a single interface (assuming it’s approved, which is very likely). The way it will work is that in the interface you’ll be able to sort out all the instructions that need to be translated and then go ahead and translate them in the same interface. You’ll also be able to categorize the instructions and then sort them by the category. If you want to have your Creole translator put instructions for events into Creole since it’s the most important to you right now, you could categorize them and send the translator to a single page to translate all the needed instructions.

Here’s a screen shot of what the new interface will look like.

Not bad, right? This change should make maintaining multilingual websites easier for site admins and make content translation process more efficient. Hopefully this in turn will make multilingual sites more prolific, or at least decrease the number of websites built for multilingual content that really only have text in one language.

Jose has been working like crazy on this and other features to put into the new multilingual system for Drupal 6, but he took a quick break today to add some screen shots of this feature this Flickr account. If you want a technical explanation of what I’m talking about and to check out the patch itself, you can do so here. There was a lot of discussion in the Drupal community on how best to translate this content - you can check it out here.