Bilingual websites – the challenge and the solution

Nov 24
2006

Bilingual websites – the challenge and the solution

By Lucian Savluc under eLiberatica,English Articles,News & Bolts

One of the most challenging problems to handle for the future eLiberatica website was the bilingual issue. We had to find the best way for providing all the information there in both English and Romanian.

Finally, I decided to use Drupal but I wasn’t satisfied with the internationalization modules provided.
Fortunately and unexpectedly, I got the most help dealing with this problem from Roberto Gerola, an Italian IT entrepreneur, developer and Open Source enthusiast. Roberto helped not only implementing his new Localizer module but also he fixed a lot of other things on eLiberatica. And all of this without asking me a single service, only by good will and a strong desire to help spreading FLOSS ideals.

Now, the website will have full bilingual syndications, taxonomy, latest news, news section and all facilities translated. We are expecting to launch it in a few weeks.

For all of you planning to develop a bilingual website or portal, I strongly recommend to try Localizer with Drupal. Is going to save you a lot of work.

Regarding Roberto, he is one of the few that I’m keeping under the section “special and very rare persons” that I know.

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4 responses so far

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# Alexon 10 Jan 2008 at 10:15 am

I checked out the eLiberatica and it seems like a well designed site and Localizer seems to work seamlessly from the user standpoint. I notice that the site doesn’t mention that it is running Drupal. What is your take on that? Do you think it’s useful for web developers to let their users know what software they’re running. As a user-developer, I find that information useful.

What other Drupal modules would you recommend?
# Lucian Savlucon 10 Jan 2008 at 12:11 pm

Hi Alex, thanks for the note.

We actually mentioned in our blogs and is not a secret we are using Drupal for eLiberatica. The considerate we didn’t mention on the site is the fact we don’t want to promote there a particular FLOSS solution (as far as eLiberatica is willing to promote FLOSS in general); on the other hand, we whished to present there information exclusively about the Conference.
If somebody is interested, he/she can send to the webmaster a mail and ask :) as in your case.

Related to the modules, I would suggest you to check with Roberto Gerola (http://www.speedtech.it/about), he is a real expert, he developed localizer.

All my best, Lucian
# Chana Riveraon 25 Jun 2010 at 8:08 am

Hello,

I need help making one of the sites I work with Bilingual. I barely know anything about computers, and or Drupal. So I’m stuck, I was put in charger of this project, and reading your comments has managed to help me have some what of an understanding. I just need to know step by step what I need to do in order to make some of my sites multi lingual.

Thanks so much in advance,
# Lucian Savlucon 25 Jun 2010 at 9:49 am

Hi Chana,

This is an old post, on that time, Drupal didn’t have native support. Now, version 6 is having all you need.
Even eLiberatica websites are outdated now, I plan to rebuild it with the new characteristics and with full internationalization in the next month or so.

To help you understand, I recommend to check this articles

- Tutorial – Building a multi-language site
- Setting up multilingual site with Drupal Internationalization (i18n)
- New features in Drupal 6 – i18n and l10n special show

Hope will help you, internationalization is not an easy thing with the websites, care should be taken. If you would need something professional, you should hire a specialist.