Finding Gold with a Multilingual Treasure Map

Multilingual is complicated—no doubt about it. Although the advancements in multilingual in Drupal 8 have been incredible, it has to solve too many needs and interact with too many parts of Drupal to ever be simple. There is a lot of excellent documentation and blog posts to help with the basics, but unless the project has an endless timeline and a limitless budget, the little things you don't think of or don't know about can lead you down a path of pitfalls and dead ends. However, it doesn’t have to be all shambles, brambles and sharp pointy sticks.

Knowing what to be prepared for, learning the basic vocabulary, and having a human-friendly road map on how to translate the varied parts of a complex modern Drupal site will impress your co-workers and might just save your life.

This session is for intermediate Site Builders and Front-end Developers—and just like Indiana Jones using the Staff of Ra—will shed some light on multilingual by talking about:

• Why/when to use multilingual
• How to estimate the impact of multilingual on project budget and timelines
• Adding and enabling default and custom languages while avoiding fatal errors
• Planning for and working with content, configuration and interface translations
• Detecting and solving right-to-left language challenges
• Removing duplicate translations from views and working with language codes in custom views links
• Translating paragraphs, media, custom twig strings and complex entity reference variables
• Improving the translation experience for editors
• Handy ways to use language detection in preprocess functions
• Working with translation url aliases and allowing editors to link from translation to translation (and reach through the ether to link to a future translation) in the WYSIWYG.