There have been some big advances made in multilanguage support in the latest release of Drupal. As you may have seen, Drupal 6 is multilingual, and it really does a nice job of handling languages and content translations. However, it does still need some help to be able to translate everything.

This is where the Internationalization package comes in, but it won’t be the same package you remember. The Internationalization package has come a long way from it’s beginnings in Drupal 4.4. After many Drupal core upgrades and the continuous addition of new features, it became the huge collection of modules and tools you saw in Drupal 5. Now that we can rely on Drupal 6 core for the low level stuff and multilingual content, we can finally start simplifying it and trimming down those big chunks of code. We can now focus much more on making it easier to set up, more simple overall, and better integrated. To make sure this happens, we’ve set some guidelines.

New Drupal 6 Guidelines for i18n:

• Seamless integration with Drupal core or “Don’t try to do better that what Drupal core already does”

• Administrator friendliness or “end this modules and options mess”

• No core patches, just install and play

• Independent modules when possible — you can use the Language Icons module without the rest of the package to add some color to your website

And now for what you’ve been waiting for.

These Features are in the i18n Module for Drupal 6:

• Translation of content type settings, like name, submission guidelines or help text.

• Localization of your full menus or the addition of specific language items. You’ll want to translate your custom menu items, and this will let you.

• Ability to view poll results added up for all languages. You can vote in any language, and see results for them all.

• Single interface for all of the translatable strings. Or export/import your taxonomy or menu translations as a separate file.

• Multiple taxonomy options and one single module that rules them all. Whether you want your terms to be localizable or to have different terms for each language, you can select the correct option.

• Synchronization of fields across translations, which means they can all edited , published, or unpublished simultaneously.

• Ability to have blocks show up only for the selected language or make custom blocks translatable.

And of course it will have multilingual variables and extended languages for content like previous versions did. Just better : ) And yes, there are update scripts for a smooth transition from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

The first development version for Drupal 6 is already available. Testers and reviewers are welcome.