Multilingual Site Considerations and Set Up

There are a number of different ways to implement multilingual content, and the earlier you plan your multilingual implementation, the easier it will be to manage the translation and transition.

There are four basic approaches to provide multilingual content:

Each of these approaches has advantages and limitations.

Translated content

The simplest way to support multilingual content is to create a single site and common content for that site, and then translate this common content into each new language you wish to support. This allows you to create your site and content in the default language, and then translate content at whatever pace you want, to make the content available in other languages.

When a user accesses content, by default dotCMS will attempt to deliver a version of that content in the user's preferred language. If a version of the content doesn't exist in the preferred language, dotCMS may display the default language version of that content instead (based on your Default Language Fall-through settings).

If you expect to have content which is the same (but just translated) in each language, this is both the simplest and the recommended approach. However this approach doesn't work as well if you expect to have a large amount of content which is not just translated, but actually different for each of your supported languages.

Translated sections of a single site

If you expect to have different content in each language (rather than just direct translations of the same content), you can create separate sections of a single site which contains the content for each different language. Typically this is done by creating separate top-level folders within the site, but this can also be done by having separate Content Types and other objects (Themes, Templates, etc.).

Notes:

• If you expect to have content which is directly translated in different languages, this approach may not work as well, since it requires you to create separate content for each content item.
• You can also simulate this approach using redirects.
  • If you create a single site and content architecture (see above), you can use redirects to make it appear that you have different sections of your site.
  • For example, you could create a single page named /page-name, translate it into Spanish, and then use Vanity URLs to translate URLs referencing /es-sp/page-name to /page-name?language_id=2.
  • This allows you to manage your content and translations in a simple manner, but also provide simple paths which specify the language.

Language Configuration Options

The following language properties can be configured via static configuration plugin, to change the behavior of the following multilingual features:

Default Backend Language

By default, the back-end interface is set to English, however, the following properties can be changed via plugin to change the default language to any of the other supported language versions:

#### LANGUAGE AND CODING INFO
CHARSET = text/html;charset=UTF-8
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE_COUNTRY = United States
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE = en_US
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE_CODE = en
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE_STR = English
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE_COUNTRY_CODE = US

Currently supported languages include: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Russian, Finnish

Language Fall-thru Options

dotCMS provides “fall-thru” options for certain types of dotCMS content/objects. If the content/object does not exist in the current language being used to browse the site, then dotCMS can be configured to display the default language version of the object instead of displaying nothing. See the System Language Properties and Default Language Fall-thru Configuration documentation for more information.

The following multilingual documentation links have been arranged both by order of importance and follow a logically sequential order in which they should be read to properly plan and implement multilingual sites.

Planning Your Language Configuration

There are many different ways to configure dotCMS to handle multilingual content and multilingual sites. Each method has advantages and disadvantages depending on how you plan to create and manage your multilingual content, especially in relation to how easy it is to share content among different languages.

Common Multilingal Configurations

The following are the most common ways customers set up dotCMS to serve multiple different language versions.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The following summarizes some of the advantages and disadvantages of using each of these methods to manage multilingual sites: