Drupal 8 multilingual modules

The benefits of making your website multilingual are unquestionable, and the opportunities for implementing it are unlimited.

This is especially true for Drupal 8, the latest Drupal release, which has multilinguality in its DNA. In addition to brilliant multilingual improvement in core, there is also a wealth of contributed modules that will help your website speak your customer’s language. This is what our topic is going to be today.

Drupal 8 modules for multilingual websites

• GTranslate (and more)

Google Translate module helps you translate your site by using the Google translation tool. It offers 103 languages, which cover 99% of World Wide Web users. In addition to nice free features, it also has paid ones like URL translation, subdirectory (site.com/fr/) or subdomain (fr.site.com), URL structure, and more.

However, you do not have to rely on Google alone, and there are modules to connect other translation tools like Lingotek, Memsource, Venga, GlobalLink, OneHourTranslation, and so on.

• Language Selection Page

Ask your guests which language they prefer by offering them a chance to select it on the corresponding landing page / splash page. It is useful when you don’t want to impose a choice on them or do not have enough information from the URLs or cookies. However, to avoid users coming to this page too often, it’s better to use this module in combination with those that detect the user’s language — like the following.

• IP Language Negotiation

Here is a module that helps you find out the user’s language and redirects them through your multilingual Drupal 8 website accordingly. It uses the power of another module for automatic country detection — the ip2country module.

• Language Cookie

When it comes to the user’s language detection, this module will also very helpful. It provides an additional "Cookie" field to the settings, so the language will be set in accordance with the cookie. You can configure the cookie name, domain and expiration time.

• Alternate hreflang

Meet your guests before they arrive — show the necessary languages and URLs right in the search results. You can do it by means of the Alternate hreflang module. It adds the appropriate tags used by search engines to all of your website pages.

• Hidden Language

If you are ready to be multilingual, but are not ready to present a particular language translation to your users, you can hide this language from them. Thanks to this special module, there is no need to disable anything, and your editors can keep translating.

• Localization client

The Localization client module will make it incredibly easy for you to see the missing translations throughout your website and fix them with the on-page editor.

• Language fallback

As for the Language fallback module, it will help you so that each language translations fall back to another language that you select.

• Language Hierarchy

Using the handy graphical user interface, you can create language hierarchies so your website’s translations fall back to parent language translations.

• CKEditor BiDi Buttons

To be truly multilingual, you often need to include audience that uses right-to-left writing. You can do this with a special Drupal 8 module. It adds the CKEditor BiDi plugin to your Drupal 8’s CKEditor, so you will have two handy buttons for right-to-left and left-to-right text direction.

That’s not all — you can discover more helpful Drupal 8 modules for multilingual features. If the available modules do not cover your specific website’s needs, custom ones can be created for you. For any issues that deal with installing, configuring, or creating Drupal 8 modules from scratch, you can always rely on Drudesk developers, whose mission is to make websites better, faster, more convenient… and more multilingual!