Translating Content in eZ Publish
Friday 31 August 2007 6:00:00 am
Recall from the seventh article in this series that a content object represents a piece of content in eZ Publish, and consists of at least one version. Each version further consists of at least one translation. Versions are the second dimension of content objects, while translations are the third dimension of content objects.
The translation layer makes it possible to represent the same version of the same content in multiple languages. A translation consists of attributes. Recall that attributes are the entity that holds the actual content, such as the title of an article. When you translate content, attributes are represented by the values of the different input fields.
Fallback system
Sometimes not all content objects have been translated into all of a site's available languages. eZ Publish has a built-in fallback system that still displays content when a particular object or its attributes have not been translated.
eZ Publish can be configured to use a prioritized list of languages. The system will first try to display content in the highest prioritized language. If an object has not been translated to this language, the system will then try to display content in the second prioritized language, and so on down the language list. If an object does not exist in any of the site languages, it will not be shown unless it is configured to override this default behavior. This override is configured in the Translations window, which is described later in this article.
Some content objects (such as user objects and folders) must always be displayed, even if they do not exist in any of the configured languages. Also, some attributes cannot be translated, such as people's names and email addresses. In this case, the same value is displayed for all translations.
Translation languages
Translation languages are the set of languages in which content can be created and translated. These can be managed via the Administration Interface. The maximum number of translation languages is 30.