Multilingual Websites in Drupal 10: Things You Need to Know

Any online business sooner or later faces the need to enhance its recognition overseas. Having a website available in a few languages is a proven way to reach a wider audience, gain more traffic, boost conversions, and grow the brand’s identity.

Thanks to the Drupal content management system, having identical websites in English, Spanish, French, and other languages is easy. With Drupal, you neither need to develop different platforms for each language nor update content separately.

In this blog post, the team at Drupfan explores what makes Drupal a perfect match for multilingual website development. Stay tuned!

Why to Build a Multilingual Website?

As we have already mentioned above, a multilingual platform is a proven way to grow a brand’s recognition around the globe. View more benefits of a multilingual site for your business:

Best way to explore foreign markets.

Providing multilingual content is more a necessity than a wish in the modern market. Reaching a wider audience and building reliable relations with new customers is crucial for a successful business operation and loyalty growth. If your customers can perceive the content from your site in their native language, their loyalty to your brand will grow. Thus, this is the first step to exploiting new markets and gaining a firm position on it.

Enhanced organic traffic and improved SEO.

Local orientation is a game-changer in the sphere of Search Engine Optimization, as the website can be displayed in search results for numerous countries. This is an obvious way not only for the engagement of the broader audience but also for organic traffic growth.

Increased conversions and sales.

Along with traffic growth, you get higher conversion rates and sales and instantly go global.

Why Building a Multilingual Website with Drupal 10?

Drupal 10 makes the development of a multilingual website seamless and straightforward and here’s why:

Drupal offers powerful built-in multilingual capabilities.
Drupal supports 100+ languages out of the box.
Drupal is scalable enough for the growth of multilingual platforms
Drupal can easily handle high traffic.
Drupal provides transliteration support (f.e. Converting characters like "ç" and "ü" to "c" and "u" for machine names, file uploads, and search results).
And more!

Drupal 10 Core Multilingual Modules

Drupal 10 offers four in-built core modules for the multilingual feature. Here, Drupfan specialists take a closer look at them.

Configuration Translation Module

The Configuration Translation module is not visible to end-users. It offers translations for configuration interfaces. It provides the ability to translate texts within configurations, such as field labels within Views. Additionally, an overview screen is provided to assist you throughout the procedure.

Content Translation Module

The Content Translation module allows users to translate content entities and various site elements like pages, taxonomy terms, and blocks into multiple languages. Mirroring the capabilities of the Interface Translation module (see below), the primary language for content can be effortlessly adjusted. In addition, users get the opportunity to hide or showcase the language selector's placement.

Interface Translation Module

The Interface Translation feature converts the default user interface, along with any additional modules and themes you've incorporated. It boasts an integrated translation UI for streamlined editing. With capabilities for automatic downloads and updates, this feature enables the utilization of any translation interface from the Drupal community in all languages recognized by Drupal 10. The Interface Translation module makes English an adjustable option, eliminating the necessity to set it as your primary language.

Language Module

The Drupal Language module allows you to choose out of 100+ languages for further website configurations. With this module, you can assign a certain language to website elements, such as nodes, views, blocks, menus, and more. Besides, it allows users with admin permissions to choose their language for the admin interface. In addition, the Language module is responsible for the built-in conversion of foreign characters into regular characters for the machine names, etc., as we already mentioned above.

Drupal 10 Contributed Multilingual Modules

Along with these in-built modules for multilingual capacity, the Drupal community offers several contributed modules to extend language capability even further.

Language Cookie Module

The Language Cookie module adds a ‘cookie’ field which helps to determine the user's native language and showcase content in it.

Language Selection Page Module

Rather than guessing the native languages of your website visitors, offer them the choice to select their preferred translation. The Language Selection Page module empowers site visitors to pick their desired language on the landing page, based on the languages activated on your Drupal site.

Multilingual Menu URLs

The Multilingual Menu URLs module creates a "Provide Translated External Link" option and allows easy override of the ‘link’ field on translated menu items.

Build a Powerful Multilingual Website with Drupfan

Multilingual website content significantly influences traffic stats, user satisfaction, customer engagement rates, and successful interactions. Picking an efficient CMS initially is essential for scalability and the potential growth of a platform.

Once Drupal 10 started to offer multilingual capabilities straight out of the box, it became a top choice for businesses for creating multilingual sites.

Our Drupal professionals at Drupfan possess extensive know-how in developing multilingual sites with Drupal CMS. Reach out today for inquiries about your Drupal multilingual setup or if you seek our expertise in its creation or maintenance.