I am working on a bilingual site in the latest version of Drupal 6. I installed the Internationalization module and the Views translation module, among many others.
The problem: On /admin/build/translate/search, some elements (e.g. the view title) appear in the text group “Views” and Drupal assumes they are in German, requiring an English translation.
Other elements (e.g. exposed filter labels) appear in the text group “Built-in Interface” and Drupal assumes they are in English, requiring a German translation. But in fact all the strings are in German:
To be clear, I am not seeing an issue with the language selection or the display of the view. The issue is when the page is first parsed by the language system and any translatable strings are inserted into the translation table. Drupal assignes different source languages for elements on the same page. The result is a mix of languages, once these strings are translated.
I thought that maybe it is the language preference of the user who hits the page first that interferes with this, but once I started changing it, I ran into this issue (reading the thread was eye-opening – it should be mandatory reading for anyone considering Drupal for enterprise-class solutions). Ok, now I have the URL prefix in the mix, which means that when a user changes the language preference, the site language does not change until they manually change the URL.
Once I managed to get the page rendered in English, it turned out that Drupal does not pick up the translation strings when the display language equals the source language. So no luck there.
I am ready to code my view in 2 languages, depending on what Drupal thinks the source language is for the various elements, but even that won’t work. Has anybody else experienced this?
I think that you probably had basic mistake in how Drupal multilingual system work. I did the same mistake in the first multilingual Drupal site that I’ve built.
The most important thing to do is – if one of your languages is English – Use English in your code. if you need to put the word ‘room’ in one of the template use t(‘room’) and not t(‘zimmer’). Your view titles? use English. Tag names and description? use English. The primary language should be English. After you setup your English site, you can translate your site using translate interface. I know it sound strange to one that his mother tongue is other than English, but I made several multilangual sites with i18n and it is the right way to do it with minimal complications.
Changing the admin interface language only change the interface – not the value. If you change the interface to German (i.e yoursite.com/de/admin/views) it doesn’t mean that you are on ‘German views’. It is the same view.
There are some exceptions – Multilingual variable as I explained here: How can I set a different homepage per language in Drupal?
I hope that is helpful.