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Unprecedented built-in support for diverse languages

Drupal 8 Core Multilingual Functionality

Article from ADMIN 33/2016

By Michael J Ross

Thanks to the efforts of the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, you can install Drupal in at least 100 languages and exercise granular control over the languages on your website.

This article first appeared in Drupal Watchdog https://drupalwatchdog.com.

Natural languages are critical components of human culture, and issues arise when people fluent in various natural languages try to use websites that assume the visitor understands only one language, typically English. Support for multiple human languages is more important than ever, as the web becomes an ever increasing global platform for commerce and culture.

Content management systems (CMSs) such as Drupal have significantly reduced the cost in time and effort for rolling out a multilingual website. In the world of Drupal, support for non-English languages was essentially an afterthought in versions up to and including the penultimate version – and the same can be said for countless other CMSs, even their latest releases.

Drupal 7 offers limited support for languages other than English. The core code allows one to install the software in another language, but that requires performing multiple steps [1]. Presenting page content in other languages requires installing and configuring up to two dozen or so additional modules not included in the Drupal core installation. Yet that's only the beginning of the arduous process, because to achieve any given feature, you may have to choose from more than one possible module. But they don't all play well together, so you often would be compelled to use the Rules module, assuming that it is sufficient to build the necessary bridges for your project.

Now We're Talking

Fortunately, Drupal 8 dramatically improves support for internationalization. The multilingual capabilities that in Drupal 7 would require a lot of contrib modules, can now be done in Drupal 8 using only four, and all of them are in core. Baking the internationalization into Drupal

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