Setup a Multilingual Drupal Site

In this section, we will cover all the steps to perform to setup the baseline required to have enable the multilingual support of the OSF for Drupal modules.

One of the core set of Drupal Multilingual tutorials has been written by Gábor Hojtsy and is available here.

Enable the Local Module
The first step is to enable the  module. This module is part of Drupal Core:



Once you checked the checkbox, save the modules settings.

Enable a New Language
The next step is to enable a new language in the Local settings. Go to the  settings, and click the   link.



Then click the Add langauge link to add a new language that you would like to handle in your OSF for Drupal portal.



Once you click the  button, your Drupal instance will now be aware of the new language you just configured.

Update Language
Now that you handle a new language in Drupal, the next step will be to update the language packages available for this language. The first thing you have to do is to download the  Drupal module, and to enable it.

Once this module is enabled, you will go to the Configurations, and then click the  link.



Then you will click the  tab.



What this section does is to help you adding and updating the language packages of all the modules you currently have on your Drupal instance, with the languages you selected previously. There you will have to choose update options that best fits you needs, and click the  button.

Setup Language Detection
The next step is to choose how you want Drupal to detect the language to use to display the content into generated Drupal pages. There are multiple options to do that. Go to the  configuration section:



Then click the  tab:



Finally choose the mechanism you want to use to do this detection.

Install and Enable the i18n Module
The next step is to download and enable the i18n (internationalization) module. This module gives access to a series of multilingual API functions, and a multiple of user interfaces that will help us properly managing the multilinguality capabilities of Drupal.

Once the internationalization module is enabled, you should also enable the following modules:
 * 1) Block languages
 * 2) Field translation
 * 3) Menu translation
 * 4) Multilingual support
 * 5) Multilingual select
 * 6) Path translation
 * 7) String translation
 * 8) Variable translation

Enabling Multilingual Support for Every Content Type
The final step that will be required is to edit all the content type that you currently have on your Drupal portal, and to enable the multilingual capabilities of each of them that you want to translate. What you have to do is to edit one of the content type (the Page content type in this example):



The you have to click the  vertical tab. Finally you have to (with translation) the content type.

Once all these steps are done, you will be able to translate all the content types pages on your Drupal instance. However, this is out of the scope of this article. If you want more information about doing this, we strongly suggest you to read Gábor Hojtsy's series of articles covering these questions in details.