The Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative (D8MI), led by Acquia owner Gábor Hojtsy and involving over 1000 contributors, is an important development focus for Drupal 8.
Multilingual First
You'll see Drupal 8 multilingual options right out of the box: at the start of the installer
Drupal 8 automatically detects your browser's language, and then automatically selects this option from the drop-down menu, for added convenience.
But even better, if you continue in a language other than English (or later add a new language to your site), it will automatically download the latest interface translations from https://localize.drupal.org/ so you can setup your entire site and configure it in your native language.
This is unlike Drupal 7, which presents users with a wall of text (in English, of course) explaining how to put the download files in particular directories in order to proceed.
Works for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic (Note that Drupal 8 is still in development, so some translations may still be missing some sequences, as is the case here.)
Drupal 8 also removes the concept of English as a "special" language. If you select a language other than English here, the English option will no longer appear in your site settings unless it is explicitly enabled.
Also, because English is a "normal" language, therefore you can make English "translatable" so you can convert for example "Log in / Log off" to "Sign in / Sign off."
Congratulations! for making Drupal more accessible to non-English speakers (the vast majority of the world).
Less Modules
Building a multilingual site in Drupal 7 requires around 30 contributed modules, and a lot of complicated configurations. In Drupal 8, all of this functionality has been simplified into just four modules, making Drupal 8 more multilingual than all of Drupal 7's contributed modules combined.
- Language
The base module other multilingual modules require, this provides Drupal 8's underlying language support.
- Configuration translation
It makes things like blocks, menus, views, etc. translatable. (Similar to Internationalization in Drupal 7).
- Content translation
Makes things like nodes, taxonomy terms, and comments translatable. (Not the same as the Content Translation module in Drupal 7; much more akin to the Translation Entity.)
- Interface translation
Makes the Drupal user interface translatable by itself. (Same as the "Local" core module in Drupal 7.)
You may ask, why four modules and not just one?
Because sites with only one language other than English are also a valid use case, and even multilingual sites may or may not need some of these features (for example, the desire to always keep user-generated content in their native language).
This kind of diversity allows site builders to choose any combination that meets specific use cases for their sites.
Language selection in all things!
Everything from system settings, to site components such as blocks, views and menus, to individual field values in content are translatable.
For "Content" entities (comments, nodes, users, taxonomy terms, etc.) you have even more options, such as the ability to configure the visibility of the language selector, and whether the newly created content will default to the language site's default, the author's preferred language, or some other value.
More agile translation in user interfaces
Additionally, a lot of effort has been put into improving the user experience of Drupal 8's multilingual functionality. You'll see much smoother translation and well-integrated interfaces everywhere.
Transcription Support
A final very useful addition to Drupal 8 is the inclusion of the Transcription Module to the core. Automatically convert special characters like "ç" and "ü" to "c" and "u", loading files, paths and search results.
... And much more!
Here are some extras for site builders, worth mentioning:
- Many of the core pages that use Views allow for much easier language-based customization, especially the admin views, where adding language filters, a language column, etc. are all easy to click together.
- Unlike the Drupal 7 Translation Entity, the Drupal 8 Core Content Translation module integrates well with core search, and the search API gets more language information as well.
- The language selection system now supports a different "admin" language as well, to make managing multilingual sites easier for site administrators.
Taken from Acquia.com
Traducido por Seed EM.