Leicester City Council Support

We were approached by one of our agency clients to convert their customer’s existing Umbraco site to be 4-way multilingual (English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese). We have plenty of experience of multi-lingual using Umbraco, so we worked closely with them to understand their requirements and choose the best approach from the many different options available to them. In conjunction with their translation agency, we ensured a smooth transition from initial idea to completed site.

The key influencers in this implementation of multi-lingual Umbraco were that:

whilst the client was starting with 4 languages this may be added to in the future;
not every page would be translated on every language site;
the site would be managed by non-native speakers of each language.

We recommended that the client use a separate branches approach whereby each language is effectively its own site and can have its own content, and so adding new languages is simply a case of adding a new section to Umbraco for the language content, and updating the Umbraco “Dictionary”. This approach means that there is no need for developers to get involved and the site can be managed and added to by someone in a non-technical role.

In order to create the translation-ready version of Umbraco we:

edited all templates and macros on the site to ensure that all English text was not hard-coded;
created the Umbraco Dictionary for each language;
created language branches of the content of the site;
exported XML of the content and the dictionary for use by the translation agency;
imported translated content and integration tested the site.

Our biggest challenge was in providing an editor interface to the Umbraco Dictionary which is normally only accessible via the Settings section of Umbraco - not a safe place for Editors to be working normally. To resolve this we used the Dictionary Dashboard package by Dennis Milandt, which as its name suggests places a dashboard on the Content section of Umbraco that editors can work with. Unfortunately that package doesn’t work in Umbraco 7, however translations are set for a big overhaul in future versions of Umbraco, but we’ll write more about that when we know more.

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