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Translations in Drupal

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Since Drupal 6 the Content translation, and Locale modules have been part of core allowing sites to be translated relatively easily. This is all thanks to Gabor Hojtsy, looking a his drupal.org profile you can see just how much work he has done for translations whilst co-maintaining Drupal 6.

I am currently working on a trilingual site with these two modules along with Translation Overview (displays what nodes are translates into which languages in an easy table), Localization client (a jQuery pop-up translation interface), and Internationalization (builds on core features to extend them). The team of translators love it, they think it is really user friendly and works well, but I have a few issues.

There are two different types of translation, content translation (nodes) and UI translation (everything else). Content is often added by end users on a live site, where as UI additions are often added by developers on a dev site. This when raises the question, where do translators add the translations? on two separate sites? UI translations can be exported to a PO file which can be read by an app such as POedit, but this will take text out of context which can make translations harder, although it makes it more portable.

Content can be given the marker of "Language neutral" or a specific language, if marked as language neutral the content is not translatable, the original languages has to be selected first. If I were a translator I would find this a little long winded.

It would be great to hear all your views on translations in Drupal, what problems do you have? and what solutions you have found?

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