Drupal 8 multilingual tidbits 8: transliteration
Submitted by Gábor Hojtsy on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 11:32Up to date as of October 16th, 2015.
We went through most of the great new base language features in Drupal 8, but one thing that was not yet covered is built-in transliteration support. Yes, you read that right. Drupal 8 includes a powerful backend system for transliteration and it even uses it for machine name generation on the frontend.
Here are a few examples on how Drupal prefills the machine name for a content type for a Hungarian, Czech and Marathi type respectively:



You don't even need to have language module enabled to use the transliteration services. However language specific transliteration patterns are supported, and the overrides are alterable. See https://drupal.org/node/1842748 for documentation on how to tap into this new API.
While this concludes the list of new base language features, that is only one of the language related modules in core. The tidbits are far from over! Excited about Drupal 8 yet?
Issues to work on
- Transliteration is only applied to machine names in core. Files would be a natural next candidate. See existing discussions in https://drupal.org/node/1842718 (includes an early patch that includes file support) and https://drupal.org/node/567832. A specific issue for files is https://www.drupal.org/node/2492171. Contributed modules can implement transliteration for anything.