JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.

Going multilingual

When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.

At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.

The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.

We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.

Migrating to Drupal

The existing static site was already online and migrating to Drupal had to be transparent. The original design was converted into a Drupal theme. Then, we used the paths module to replicate the exact URL structure so that pages that are already indexed by search engines, remain the same.

All the site's navigation was originally implemented as a top bar with drop down items, so Drupal's menus fitted that exactly. Blocks placed in the sidebar implemented the rest of the functionality and the site's migration to Drupal was complete in about a week. We were now ready to begin the work we were hired to do - translate JVIS site.

Adventures in translation

Translating the content in JVIS was straight forward, but as soon as most of it was complete, the real problems began appearing. Problems included broken links between translated pages, missing images and Flash and missing translation for block contents.

The translators working on this project don't know anything about how Drupal works and how nodes, menus and blocks are built, so they are not able to fix technical problems (like changing links from /services/engineering.php to /ko/node/59). The web designer doesn't understand Korean so doing those fixes manually would have been a rigorous task.

Instead, the translation module took over all the technical issues in this project. The web designer migrated the English pages to Drupal, the translators translated, and the translation module placed everything where it needs to go.

Drupal proves very reliable for delivering multilingual contents. The node translation, along with Drupal's string translation render the correct text for every element in the page. We found it much easier to use with Drupal's standard elements than with custom PHP functions.

As soon as we tried implementing custom PHP functions in the theme, rendering the correct language became a challenge. We discovered it's much easier to customize the theme's CSS in order to get the desired results and keep using Drupal's standard elements than to write our own.

Communicating with visitors in 6 languages

JVIS global website now welcomes visitors from different countries speaking different languages. All, pages, including the contact form are fully localized.

The next step for JVIS website is adding a support ticket system with built in back and forth translation. This would allow visitors to communicate with JVIS in their own languages. Each visitor to JVIS site may be an important decision maker in the automotive industry and it's crucial to reduce communication barriers to a minimum.

We'll be happy to tell more about that when it's ready.

Modules

This project uses only existing contributed modules. The major modules used are:

• Internationalization (i18n) - used to turn the site multilingual.
• Path - used to keep the exact same URL of pages as in the previous implementation.
• Language icons - used to display country flags next to language names.
• ICanLocalize - used to translate the contents from English to the rest of the languages.

Who did what

Jason Marshall created the theme for the new JVIS site and rebuilt the entire site on Drupal. Amir Helzer and Bruce Pearson of OnTheGoSystems,Inc. are responsible for the ICanLocalize translation module.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x