nationalise your site with enlisted variables

Submitted by clemens on Fri, 2009/11/13 - 10:27am

With drupal we can enable the locale module and install the i18n module to internationalise and translate our site we can make our hands dirty by visiting the http://build2be.com/admin/build/translate/search.

Still our work is not finished yet. We have to dive into settings.php to translate more strings of our site.

Taken from http://drupal.org/node/275705#comment-1058360 and using http://drupal.org/projects/drush_sm we learn we may choose from a lot of variables.

By running the following command we can start cherry picking our variables enlisted to translate. We could off course run an SQL statement but that would spoil the fun.

drush sm list variables | less

After deciding what variables we need we can export these variable values to send over to a translator by running

drush sm export variables - site_name site_slogan site_mission site_footer anonymous | less

Next step is changing settings.php like this

$conf = array(
  'i18n' => array(
    'site_name',
    'site_slogan',
    'site_mission',
    'site_footer',
    'anonymous',
    'user_mail_password_reset_subject',
  ),

followed by uncommenting the line just after 'reverse_proxy_addresses'

#   'reverse_proxy_addresses' => array('a.b.c.d', ...),
);

Not we told the i18n module to localise some of our site variables.

It would be great to run drush sm import variables for uploading our translated variables but unfortunately it doesn't work like that. The i18n module uses it's own tables for performance reason.

So we end with navigating to the appropriate language dependent pages and see 'This is a multilingual variable' next to our form fields on pages like

Site Information
User Information
etc depending on what variables you added to i18n_variables

Happy (inter)nationalise your site.

free form: