Joomla User Manual

Multilingual Sites¶

Install additional languages in your site and you may think you have a multilingual site. Almost, but not quite. Human entered text has to be translated by humans. That includes such things as article titles and content, menu item titles, module titles and in some cases content, and more. You can just create the same items in each language that you use. That works just fine but it can be a bit tedious. That is where the Multilingual Associations component comes in useful. It is designed to display content in different languages side by side so that you can easily translate from one language to another.

Items for Association¶

The following items can be included in associations:

• Content: Articles and Categories
• Contacts: Contacts and Categories
• Menus: Menu Items
• News Feeds: News Feeds and Categories
• Others: Third party components may be coded to use associations.

The following screenshot shows an example list of articles in English with their equivalents in other languages.

The last article on Mountains has not yet had equivalent articles created in other languages. The missing articles can be translated from the original English from this page.

Creating an Article Translation¶

If you have created a multilingual site you will have created a language category for each language and perhaps an article in your default language. If not, do that now. The example article is entitled Mountains. You can create the associated articles directly from the Article: Edit form. This example uses the Multilingual Associations list instead. The translated text for this example has been obtained with Google Translate.

• Select Components → Multilingual Associations from the Administrator menu.
• For the article without associations, select one of the buttons in the Not Associated column, fr-FR in this example.
• In the Multilingual Associations: Edit Associations form enter a Target Title: Montagne
• In the Target Article Text enter the new text, translated or copied and pasted from a translation service.
• Set the Category to the the language category, French (fr-FR) in this example (not shown in the screenshot - it is further down).
• Select Save Target From the Toolbar.
• Select Close.
• Repeat for the other languages.

Creating a Menu Translation¶

Continuing with the Mountains example:

• Select Menus → Main Menu (en-GB) assuming that is your default language specific menu.
• Select the New button from the Toolbar.
• In the Menus: New Item form enter a Title: Mountains.
• Use the Select button in the Menu Item Type field.
• Select Articles → Single Article from the popup Menu Item Type form.
• Use the Select button in the Select Article field.
• Select the Mountains from the Select an Article list.
• Select English (en-GB) from the Language drop-down list.
• Save.
• Select the Associations tab.
• For each Language use the +Create button to create an equivalent translated menu item.
  • Enter the translated Title.
  • Make sure the Menu is set to that for the selected language.
  • Save & Close

Site View¶

Open or reload the site view to check that your menus and articles are displayed as expected.