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 labelled “Show the language in the URL”.

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¶

For basic use you don’t need to do anything. Zotonic base site adds a lang attribute to the html tag, and when a right-to-left language is selected (for instance Arabic), the browser will interpret lang="ar" and automatically adapt the content to right-to-left.

Custom right-to-left content¶

If you write your own templates, you can add the lang tag in the html or body tag, for instance:

<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" %} >

To create individual right-to-left elements, you can use the same principle:

<div {% include "_language_attrs.tpl" %}></div>

And when you want to force a specific language:

<div {% include "_language_attrs.tpl" language=`en` %} >This is English content</div>