Development Seed Blog

Building common sense into Drupal's i18n

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to update content like your organization's address or an event location for every translation you have of that content? Well if you have a multilingual website where this matters, we have good news for you. This week and Jose and Alex are working to make it easier to synchronize content between translations, which will cut down on the amount of time website administrators have to spend making the same change to web pages in different languages. And hopefully they’ll have a solution next week that will be available in the next release of the internationalization (i18n) module for Drupal 5.

The way it works now, in most cases, is that translations of your site content are treated like separate pieces of content. This means, for example, that if you make a change to the English version of your About page, you’ll need to make the same change to the Spanish version of your About page. If you want to rework the description of your organization, this is no problem since you’d likely want to do this by hand to make sure both versions sound great. But what if you were just changing your address? And what if your website was in twelve different languages? It would be nice to only have to make that change once, wouldn’t it?

Soon you’ll be able to do that. We’re working now to expand the synchronization that’s possible between translations. Right now there is a degree of synchronization – for event dates and time, for example – and we think more of this will make managing multilingual websites easier for everyone. The goal is to make it possible for site administrators to determine what parts of their site content should be synchronized to their translations.

Imagine how much easier it would be if this list also included other fields like event location, website, and contact information. But we don’t want to stop with just syncing up events. Site admins will also get to decide if they want to synchronize fields in other content types. This will give a lot of control to site admins and save them a lot of time and mundane work when they maintain multilingual websites. What site admin doesn’t want that?

This is still a work in progress, but those are the basic ideas we want to integrate into Drupal’s multilingual system. If you have more ideas of how we can improve the interface and the system, post them here. We’ll post updates here as we move forward with this and other work on multilingual support.