Building multilingual projects in Drupal: tales from the road.

Building multilingual projects in Drupal: tales from the road.

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Straight from Brussels, Europe's ultimate linguistic mosh pit, we share our experiences in supporting multilingual projects. As most of our clients require support for at least Dutch, English and French, we are committed to implement multiple languages as swiftly and seamlessly as possible. Needless to say, this is not easy to accomplish.

Multilingual support can be all too quickly formulated in the requirements document (a mere 'support multiple languages' generally does the trick).
However, having to support more than one language can explode the complexity of a project very fast. At the analysis great care must be taken to describe the clients needs (and verify it to Drupal's limitations). On configuration, how can we match these to get a working Drupal installation?

There is much to discuss, but we mainly focus on what can go wrong.
. Additionally, we propose some measures to reduce risks, complexity and
development time for multilingual projects.

Our aim is to identify the key components needed to support multiple
languages (both on analysis and configuration level). We (try to)
unravel the difficulties in creating such a project. We discuss
the pitfalls, ditches, roadblocks and punctures that riddles the path
to finalization. The ultimate goal is a slick, seamlessly integrated
product, produced by a painless and uneventful development process.

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