How to Make Your Website Multi-Lingual in Umbraco CMS?

Developing a website with multiple languages is really an interesting thing for me and I have recently developed a Multi-language site in Umbraco for one of my clients. The reason for choosing Umbraco CMS is its simple and immense flexibility that it offers to the developers.  Since it has a lot of possible solutions to create a multilingual site, it is often a preference for the developers to create websites based on the platform.

   

Umbraco is a popular CMS that offers easy to use features and various tools for publishing web content. Based on the Microsoft .Net technology, it is quick and painless to create the very basic Multilanguage sites. Though there are various ways to develop a site, in this blog, I will share with you the method of creating a separate home page for each language that you have chosen to implement.

Create the languages of your choice:

The first thing that you need to consider while developing a multilingual site is to create the different languages for your site. This can be done by logging to Umbraco back-office and then clicking on the “Settings” menu and right click on the “Languages” submenu and then click on the “Create” option. Select the preferred languages of your choice from the dropdown menu and then click on the create button.

Considering the hostnames, sub domains and sub folders:

A single language website usually has only one homepage and when we create a multi-lingual website, we need to create multiple home pages, each for one language that we want to translate to. Now that you have more than one homepages, you will need to consider the URL also. Basically, you have two option available before you, sub-domain or sub directories.  Sub-domain would look like uk.xyz.com and this would set up the host header and the hostname will point the visitor to the UK website. But this approach is not very good for the SEO purpose, instead the alternative approach is to use the sub-directories like www.xyz .com/uk/.

Handling the content: 

When creating a multilingual site in Umbraco CMS, we usually follow the process of developing one website in a language first and then fix all the issues related to design. Then we create the other website, either manually or simply duplicate the existing site and also copy the content for each language that we want to keep.

Setting up the dictionary: 

Now that you know the basics of creating up a multilingual website, we need to discuss one more thing that is how to implement multi-language values for things like labels and placeholders. In most cases the developers use a resource file, but this file cannot be easily edited by the content editor.

Umbraco CMS offers the users with a dictionary type and this is different from the C# dictionary which is a key/ value pair. And in Umbraco, the dictionary is a key, multi value pair. So after you set up many languages and create a new dictionary, you can then add the different values for each country as required.

To conclude, I can say that UmbracoCMS development gives the users various options to create multi-lingual website without the need of much coding. Therefore, people without much programming knowledge can also use this feature to make their websites accessible to users having different language preferences.