Help managing translations

[dmthangtay]

Hello,
I am trying to translate my website to another language, making it bilingual.

The problem is that I have almost 200 articles, and I don't see how to control the relationship between an article in one language or other (they are treated as two different articles, not linked in any way).

Can you recommend a plugin to control the translation of these articles?

[imanickam]

You could try the extensions such as Falang and KMFasTrans Lite that are listed at http://extensions.joomla.org/category/l ... al-content.

You may need to create multiple test environments to test them and to find out the pros & cons.

[Marvin_Martiano]

If you follow the standard advice on setting up multilanguage Joomla websites https://docs.joomla.org/Language_Switcher_Tutorial or similar], you do not define relationships between both versions of (essentially) the same article, but relationships between MENU ITEMS in both languages.

Here screenshot of a few of my ENGLISH nav menu's items: all items are linked to a specific ITALIAN nav menu item:

Screenshot 2016-06-24 16.13.16.png

Doubleclicking on the "association" icon(s --- if more than 2languages) lets you change what item they point to.

So with your working Joomla site, I'd
-- take a backup and work from that (whether elsewhere like on LAMP/MAMP/WAMP localhost, or change database and/or database prefix and work on a hidden location on your normal webhost),
-- follow instructions to make it multilanguage
-- duplicate all your articles while setting their language code to the new language (this will be less tedious in SQL/phpmyadmin than manually! misstype and all is broken! you have good backups I hope...).
-- duplicate your english menu and set its language to the new language, making the correct conversions for each item (pointing to the 'translated' versions) and linking to the right English counterpart. (This defines the actual relationship; it is automatically symmetric, don't have to do it the other way too.)
-- start translating your articles... you can keep track of what is/isn't translated because they're articles with English titles but labeled as NOT english.

The following may or not may be an issue for you: If your menu item points to a category (say "articles about birds") and you click on a specific article (say "about blackbirds"), then switching language you cannot be moved onto the counterpart article, but I guess you'll be in the counterpart category ("translated articles about birds"). This would be because you don't have a 1-1 relationship between articles, but between menu-items! The computer is told what the translation of "articles about birds" is, not what "about blackbirds" is; the computer cannot invent this.

In my case the above problem cannot happen, because ALL menu items point to single articles EXCEPT for one, and that one has submenu items pointing to each single article; and hence 1-1 relationship between all articles. This may or may not be an issue/ possible for you, depending on your setup.

[infograf768]

you do not define relationships between both versions of (essentially) the same article,

The doc is incomplete. You can also associate articles, categories, contacts, newsfeeds.

[Marvin_Martiano]

Excellent! Didn't know that (and hadn't needed it).

I will experiment to see what happens if I associate an article with its correct translation, but the menu items pointing to them (as 'single article') associated wrongly --- I'm guessing menu items get priority over articles, as with most settings (like if you change the show/hide setting on e.g. titles, the menu item's setting overrides the article's).

[infograf768]

Associating articles does not "override". It just routes to the already existing menu item url, if it exists.

[Marvin_Martiano]

Hi Infograf,

I think that's what I meant: Imagine you associate your article (say Article_en) with a given translation (called Article_fr), and you have associated the menu item that brought you there (call it Item-pointing-to-Article_en) with an item pointing to something else (call it Item-pointing-to-AlternativeArticle_fr).

Then switching language EN-->FR while reading "Article_en" will bring you to "AlternativeArticle_fr" not to "Article_fr": In this sense, the menu's association trumps the article's association. (So "trump" is a better choice here; I wonder why I avoided that word .)