Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

by Jason Press -
Number of replies: 4

Hello,

I'm looking at the best/easiest way to translate my Moodle 2.9.1 site (Essential theme) into Spanish. We've got much of the content/text already translated but my site also contains a lot of video files for which we're adding subtitles or replacing them with Spanish-language versions wherever possible.

I'm wondering what the best way to implement the translations will be. Some kind of language-switcher function (i.e. you can click "Español" and be taken to the Spanish-language version of the site) would be nice but I'm not sure exactly how best to implement that. If we could have all our English and Spanish content and files exist on the same site/domain, that would be great, but again, I'm not sure if that's very easy to do.

The alternative is of course to just build a totally separate Moodle site at a different domain based off a copy of our existing site. In a sense, this solution could be more straightforward for us but would require extra maintenance as any design changes, updates/upgrades, etc. would all need to be made on both sites in order to keep them in sync.

I'm hoping that someone will be able to offer some informed advice for my situation. Specifically, I'm looking for a method that doesn't require anything overly complex/technical as we aren't familiar enough with programming/MySQL to consider building our own custom solution. However, any ideas or thoughts are most welcome!

Lastly, I suppose this question might already have been asked and answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find it. If there is an existing forum post that discusses this topic, I would grateful to know about it.

Thank you,
JP

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In reply to Jason Press

Re: Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

by Richard Oelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

'I suppose this question might already have been asked and answered elsewhere,' - It has, see below for one of the most recent links

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=326138#p1311319

You may want to look towards the bottom of that thread where David mentions two new (at the time) plugins that make this process quite straightforward smile

And yes, it is easy to do within a single course, let alone a single site, using the language selector (you just need to install the language packs to your site) and multilang filters and these plugins.


Richard

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

by Robert Brenstein -
If your content in both languages is 1:1, then using multilang filter within the same course is optimal as Richard suggested above. If, however, the content varies or dealing with multilang filter is too much hassle for your people, you may consider having parallel courses for each language. Each approach has pros and cons.
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In reply to Robert Brenstein

Re: Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

by Jason Press -

Thank you Richard and Robert,

That's perfect and will get us off to a great start!

JP

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In reply to Robert Brenstein

Re: Language-Switching for Content, Media Files, etc.

by Richard Oelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

My previous hack to the multilang filter (in the linked forum discussion), and now the new plugins that were linked in that discussion don't necessarily require the content to be translateable 1:1 as they will both handle whole blocks of text rather than individual spans as the core multilang filter does - although obviously it's easier to manage if there is at least block for block equivalence in the language content, ratehr than two entirely separate sets of content smile

The example I have used previously and presented at last year's Moodle MootIEUK (and OER15 & ALT-C) though the content included text, videos and images all wrapped in a single div per language, so entire large scale chunks of content can be wrapped in these filters, making the process much easier than with the core multilang filter.

Agree, there may be circumstances where parallel courses are a better fit - we found when we looked at it that this wasn't the case for us and went with the hacked multilang filter to maintain everything in one course. But I do point out every time I'm asked, that different institutions and use cases may prefer to do things differently - however, I would say that there is certainly no need to go to the extreme of a different site/domain as Moodle does have these tools to allow you to achieve this fairly easily smile

R

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