Question

If you’re not a native English speaker doing Drupal, then the i18n module is probably the only way. This is why it seems very strange to me that the performance admin page says that i18n might not work with aggressive caching or (in the case of PressFlow) external-mode caching.

I find it hard to believe that multilingual drupal sites scale worst or harder than sites with one language.

scale worst/hard = scale without advanced caching

Is there anyone with experience using the i18n with aggressive or external-mode caching?

Answer 1

You do not need i18n for translating your site into another language.

This is a collection of modules to extend Drupal core multilingual capabilities and be able to build real life multilingual sites.

In other words:

• Drupal comes with its own, basic multilingual features.
• If you only need to translate your site, it is not multilingual. In that case you don’t need i18n AT ALL.

For translating, localisation, in core, suffices. This translates the interface using PO files. These files are imported into the Database. You will see slight performance-drop, but nothing worth worrying about.

For multilingual, try core translation features. If they do not suffice, backtrace, and evaluate all possibilities. i18n being just one of them:

• multisite: run multiple sites that share parts of the database (users/sessions etc)
• two separate sites: one for each language.
• i18n.
• Tags: just use a tag to mark the language of a document (needs some theming to be done Right, like flags in place of tagnames and lang= attributes in HTML)
• more, to be found in the forumns on Drupal.org