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ICanLocalize is working on a translation system that will enable building multilingual websites using WPMU.

The idea is to use WPMU to serve different language versions of the same contents instead of different independent sites.

Why WPMU?

WordPress is designed to serve contents in a single language. WP core and database structure doesn’t include multilingual support in the same blog. It’s possible to hack this, use custom fields to add language information and add language names to permlinks, but this means bending the rules and breaking things in various places.

A much cleaner approach is to keep running each blog in a single language and use WPMU to serve individual blogs as one unit. This way, users can configure WPMU to serve different languages as sub-domains or directories of the same domain.

How will this look like?

The solution ICanLocalize is working on includes:

  • Synchronizing between contents in different languages.
  • Adjusting internal and external links to go to the same content in the correct language.
  • Adding language selectors.
  • Comment moderation and reply in the author’s language.

The idea is that the authors can enter contents in their native language and translations follow automatically. Each post or page would show contents and comments in a single language (language selectors would lead to the corresponding contents in other languages). Readers would leave comments in their languages and authors will be able to moderate and respond in their native language.

Who needs it?

This sort of translation system would make it possible to run a multilingual blogs, but the more interesting application is using WPMU for building full multilingual websites using WordPress. Such sites often include a mix of pages for “static” contents and posts for “news”.

It turns out that many people are switching from established content management systems, such as Joomla!, to WordPress. It’s just much easier to build it with WordPress and the results are great. When used to build business sites, multilingual support is basic feature in any modern CMS and this approach might fill the demand.

Project status

The basic parts of this translation system are already up and running. You can see a live example at the popular WebLogToolsCollection who’s Spanish version is being maintained with it.

There’s still a lot of work to be done making everything a bit more user friendly and better documented (or even better, just require less documentation).

To try it yourself, check out this getting started guide.

What do you think?

Leave a comment and tell us where you’d like to see this going.

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