Well, I really know why now they say to only attempt Multilingual if you have a brand new site. I don’t even have much content but just changing one menu with 9 items took about 30 minutes. And that was just to change the link name on the menu.
I am not going to go too far into this subject except to say that this is the toughest part of Drupal that I have encountered. There is a lot of ambiguity and a lot of clicking.
Here is what I did to change the items on an existing menu so that someone whose account specifies spanish will see the options in spanish while someone using the defaults of english will still see them in english. This assumes that you have all the same modules installed that I have. Buyer Beware on this. I make no claims that it will work for you the same way.
- Edit the menu and set it to Translate and Localize
- Click the translate tab and translate the title of the menu
- Click List Links
- Edit each English link and set it from Language Neutral to English
- Save it
- Go back into the item and click the Translate tab
- Provide a translation
- Save
- Do this for all the links then reorder them so they appear as you would like them
If you don’t save after you change the link from Language Neutral, the translation won’t take. It’s a quirk. At least with the combination of modules that I am using. The point of this is, you can make all this work but it can be tedious and requires a really thorough understanding of all the options. Which I don’t have right now. I’m just trying to achieve a fairly limited scope.
TIPS – I’m Doing Views Now. This is a reason to sue variations of a View whenever possible. It will simplify the translation process for the interface should you decide to do that.
Leave a piece of content as Language Neutral if you don’t plan 0n translating it. otherwise, it won’t show up for user accounts that have the language other than the one specified on the content. it will simply vanish.
landie.tech 