mod_translation¶

This module provides support for dealing with multiple languages.

How content and static strings are translated is explained in full in Translation.

Language as part of the URL¶

By default, mod_translation prefixes each URL (using URL rewriting) in your website with the code of the current language. The idea behind this is that each language version of a resource gets its own URL, and is as such indexable for Google.

This behaviour is enabled by default, but can be switched off in the admin, by going to Structure, Translation. There is a checkbox at the bottom of the page.

Alternatively you can set the config key mod_translation.rewrite_url to false.

Programmatically switching languages¶

In a template, you can use mod_translation’s postback hook to switch between languages:

{% button text="Dutch" postback={set_language code="nl"} delegate=`mod_translation` %}

Creates a button which switches to Dutch. And another one for english:

{% button text="English" postback={set_language code="en"} delegate=`mod_translation` %}

Supporting right-to-left languages¶

To support right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, you need to make some changes to your templates. mod_translation adds some support to help you.

The idea is to give your <body/> tag the text direction of the main item visible on the page. Individual items, for example in menus or context lists, need their own text direction.

You can specify the text direction element attributes by including a template:

<body {% include "_language_attrs.tpl" id=id %} >

This will generate the following, when Zotonic selected Arabic for the page with id id:

<body xml:lang="ar" lang="ar" dir="rtl" class="rtl">

When you want to add an extra class added to the rtl or ltr class you can use:

<body {% include "_language_attrs.tpl" id=id class="my-body-class" %} >

And when you want to force a specific language:

<body {% include "_language_attrs.tpl" language=`en` %} >