Multilingual

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).

What I have seen for now from Drupal 7 is, that everything will be better, faster, easier and more logical and user-friendly.
Unfortunately, for the time being, I cannot use Drupal 7 in productive environments because it is not stable (surely after this conference).
For that reason I will describe my adventures with Drupal 6.

Drupal has the technical infrastructure for running multilingual sites. Knowing the ins and outs of the system and configuration, however, is not a trivial task.

Building scalable translation workflows that fit your organization's needs is even harder. How can you run a truly multilingual site with Drupal without going insane or broke?

The new Translation Management module is how. Built as a wrapper on top of Drupal's core translation tools and the i18n module, the Translation Management module is a new effort to automate or streamline the entire process.

Apache Solr is a powerful search engine well integrated with Drupal. Solr provides faceted or "guided navigation" which allows site visitors to quickly find what they are looking for by narrowing or refining their query by simply clicking on the links provided as "facets".

Unfortunately, the standard Apache Solr Search Integration module is not very suitable for non-English websites. A lot of manual work is necessary to provide a working setup e.g. for German or French websites.