localization

Drupal 8 makes huge-huge strides in terms of reaching more people on the globe by making everything translatable and automating translation downloads and updates from the community among hundreds of other improvements. What about software translation contribution though? We did not make progress on that front in core, but it is not very hard to do as a contributed module.

The Localization client module is available for Drupal 7 and 6. It does two things: it provides an alternate nicer user interface to translate Drupal (modules) and it allows you to contribute to the community right from that interface. Drupal 8 already improved the built-in translation interface considerably, so it made sense to start with porting the contribution functionality and integrate that first. The initial Drupal 8 port of that is available for your testing now!

To try it out:

• Join the https://localize.drupal.org/ team you want to contribute translations to (if not already). For testing, you can use the test language. Or better: just test with good translation suggestions so your reviewers will be happy.
• Grab the Drupal 8.x-1.0-alpha1 version of Localization client. Install the Localization Client Contributor submodule only (you would not be able to install the other one yet anyway).
• The module comes with contribution enabled by default, but you need to set your API key so localize.drupal.org can identify you. Edit your user account on your site and enter the API key there. (Follow the instructions on the API key field on your user account edit screen).
• If you want to grant other people to contribute, grant them the Contribute translations to localization server permission to contribute and tell them to enter their respective API keys on their user profiles.
• Now when you go to the built-in software translation UI it will tell you that all things changed will also be submitted to localize.drupal.org and the submit button will reflect that too, to make it super-clear. If you did not set your API key yet, it will tell you to do that instead.
• Once submitting the translation changes, it will let you know how many strings were successfully submitted and any errors encountered as well. All messages are also logged for later review.

The resulting effect of submitting changes locally are visible remotely by the community as well, yay!

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Happy translating! See known issues and report more at https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/l10n_client?version=8.x Further improvements are of course possible, issues are welcome!

After reviewing language support and translation for many of Drupal's pieces, we arrived at a pretty complex question, building multilingual navigation. The question is especially of importance because we often need to put translated content in menus, and the cross of translation of content and translation of menus can easily get us into the woods. Let's build some simple solutions for different use cases to see how to think of multilingual menus.

My last post where I've explained how Internationalization module re-implements some of Field API and where it does not do that it misses crucial functionality did not get much discussion. Therefore I decided to turn the key point at the end to the center of discussion: that either Drupal core will do fields for all user input (content and configuration alike, all through form your site name to your views empty text), or i18n module needs to do it in contrib. There is a clear need for input widgets, validators, permission handling, storage and output formatters and rendering used consistently. If it is not done by core, it will keep being a bolted-on half-failing approach despite best efforts in contrib. Please discuss at http://groups.drupal.org/node/154434

The other important post that we need your input on is about removing all UI strings from code. There are various issues with having them in code, while there are also various disadvantages to removing them from there. There are performance, translatability and even user experience concerns involved. This post is already getting some discussion, but we need much more. This could be a huge, fundamental change, so all your input is welcome. Don't say we did not ask you. Please discuss at http://groups.drupal.org/node/154394

Your input helps shape Drupal 8 and how Drupal supports building multilingual sites for years to come. Have your voice heard now!

There is great discussion forming on my previous posts on exportables and user provided text as well as the dangers of using t() for user editable data, and I can only hope we can keep that up! In that tradition, I'm cross-posting this piece to groups.drupal.org as well for discussion.

Regular readers could find this boring, but let's reiterate the three working modes that all objects should ideally be able to handle in Drupal to support multilingual site building.

1. Being able to mark an object as in one language.
2. Being able to mark an object as in one language and relate it to others as being a translation set. This is useful when you want to use the different language objects in different relations, track their history separately, have different permissions and workflows for them, etc.
3. Being able to translate pieces of the object that need translation and leave the rest alone. Load the right language variant of the object dynamically as needed. This is very useful for keeping external relations intact and sharing common fields between translations effortlessly.

There are certain things, where not all of these make sense. For the site's name for example, people would probably only use either (1) or (3). For a block for example, people should be able to use either based on their needs. (2) is useful to place blocks differently on translated pages, (3) is good to keep the placement consistent without effort. This can be different on a per-block basis. Same applies to nodes, menus, taxonomy, views, rules, and so on.

In my previous post titled Drupal's multilingual problem - why t() is the wrong answer posted on my blog and on groups.drupal.org for feedback, I've detailed issues with using t() as a translation tool for "user provided data". This post goes into some further details, a discussion of current solutions which could form basis for discussion of future solutions.

How can we even tell the difference between code and user provided translatables?

It is fair to assume that many multilingual sites will not have English as their default language (many not even as any of their supported languages), so we cannot assume that blocks, menus, and so on are entered in English. However, source code based strings are considered part of the user interface, and as such assumed to be written in English. What does this has to do with default configurations set up by modules and How do we reconcile this with the growing popularity of exportables and features (as in Feature module generated versioned export packages)? Let's look at these two questions.

Drupal is a great system to run foreign language websites on. The core itself is written in English and modules and themes are expected to follow suit. For developers, very simple wrapper functions are available to mark your translatable strings and let Drupal translate them to whatever language needed. These are the famous t(), the less famous format_plural() and a whole family of other functions. See my cheat sheet (PDF) and the drupal.org documentation for more on this.

Then there is "the other side", whatever does not come from code. Drupal works pretty well and very consistent if you want all of those to be in a foreign language (i.e. not English), but not in multiple languages (any of which can be English at that point). Drupal only has direct multilingual support in nodes (+ fields of entitites) and for path aliases. But life with Drupal means you work with all kinds of other objects like blocks, views, rules, content types, etc which are not "language-aware".

Unfortunately for building multilingual Drupal sites, this is the biggest problem that needs to be worked around. The contributed Internationalization module attempts to fill in the gaps, provide language associations and different workflows for translating these language-unaware objects. This works to some degree, but is really not easy without much help from the modules implementing these objects.

In 2003 I selected Drupal to replace an aging PostNuke system on a Hungarian web developer community site (weblabor.hu) that I helped ignite a few years before. Of course I needed it fully translated to Hungarian. If you were using Drupal back then, you may remember that adding a new language to your site meant running ALTER TABLE queries on your locale tables to add new columns, editing your settings file and handling database dumps of your translations (which was the only way to share them too).

Drupal has come a long way since then.

I just got back from Drupalcamp Stockholm 2011, which was an action-packed two days for me to say the least. Due to a busy schedule, I was only able to arrive last minute the night before and leave just right after my sessions on the second day. Once again I decided to do a multilingual session all over again starting from the drawing board. There are lots of new things happening plus I think I'm developing better models to explain the components involved, so I think it was a good idea to build a new presentation. I've also presented on Drupal Security on behalf of the security team, which I hope turned out to be a very informative introduction to some of the most important things to look for when securing sites.

While writing the Drupal 7 multilingual features posts and planning for the upcoming items in the series, I always wanted to figure out a framework for thinking of these items and to match core features and modules with contributed module functionality. Drupal 7 clearly is a multilingual system with additional contributed modules only. Also, there are so many modules involved that a summary of which Drupal objects they work with and what functionality they serve would be clearly beneficial to summarize in an overview.

Google is at it again! The legendary Google Summer of Code (GSoc) is organized again for 2011, and it should be lots of fun for students, mentors and organizations alike. GSoc is a summer-long activity for students where they can work on interesting and real problems with open source projects and earn money in the process to pay for college or whatever they wish.