Blog: Multilanguage

How the Internationalization Package Will Help with Translations

There have been some big advances made in multilanguage support in the latest release of Drupal. As you may have seen, Drupal 6 is multilingual, and it really does a nice job of handling languages and content translations. However, it does still need some help to be able to translate everything.

This is where the Internationalization package comes in, but it won't be the same package you remember. The Internationalization package has come a long way from it's beginnings in Drupal 4.4. After many Drupal core upgrades and the continuous addition of new features, it became the huge collection of modules and tools you saw in Drupal 5. Now that we can rely on Drupal 6 core for the low level stuff and multilingual content, we can finally start simplifying it and trimming down those big chunks of code. We can now focus much more on making it easier to set up, more simple overall, and better integrated. To make sure this happens, we've set some guidelines. 

New Drupal 6 Guidelines for i18n:

• Seamless integration with Drupal core or "Don't try to do better that what Drupal core already does"
• Administrator friendliness or "end this modules and options mess"
• No core patches, just install and play
• Independent modules when possible - you can use the Language Icons module without the rest of the package to add some color to your website

And now for what you've been waiting for.

These Features are in the i18n Module for Drupal 6: