Multilingual sites in Drupal 7

In Drupal 7, it wasn't very easy to create multilingual sites and make all your content and settings translatable. There were too many components that utilized different ways to translate content, and all of these components had too many dependencies. Even for experienced site builders, it could be a real struggle to set up those components and dependencies.

We will describe some of the basic aspects of Drupal 7's multilingual approach before covering details of multilingual sites in Drupal 8.

The Locale module

The main translation component in Drupal 7 was the Locale module. It gives you basic language support and is responsible for translating the site's user interface. Without the Locale module, you cannot set up your site to display texts in another language, and you will also be unable to translate common strings, such as the text on submit buttons.

As shown in the preceding image, the Locale module makes it very easy to translate strings...