Creating a multilingual site in Umbraco

Question

Hi,

I am rather new to umbraco and currently building a web site for my employer.

This site will need to support multiple languages. My question is how this should be implemented with umbraco.
I am looking at the following approaches:

• Create the site structure once and entering different translations for each page.
  This is described here, although I am not exactly sure to what extent this applies to umbraco 4.5.2.
• Create different file trees for every language and fill in the pages with appropriate translations as described here

The site contains some advanced functionality (sign-up form linked to another domain etc.) and the page contents will be mostly the same.
We might need to have some subpages only be visible in some languages - can this be achieved with the first approach?

What would be the best way to do this with umbraco?

Thank you,
Martin

Answer 1

As always, it depends :-).

I have used the approach to create different trees a few times with great success a few times.

I also do the addition that I create the tree roots in the root of the content tree (looks like multiple hmoepages in the Content tree in umbraco) and then use "Manage hostnames" (see http://umbraco.org/documentation/books/running-multiple-websites-on-one-umbraco-installation-(1)/setting-up-umbraco) to set which tree (and language) each hostname maps to. This addition requires that it is OK to use different domains (or subdomains) for each language.

This solution give the following advantages:

1. You can use the Dictionary in umbraco when translating the site.
2. You can have different site trees for each language.