Can Miva 9 handle multiple languages?

[jfazar]

Or if it doesn't do it out of the box then perhaps it's fairly easy to incorporate Google Translate? Has anyone done this before? I have a client that is looking for this functionality. Thanks!

[Brennan]

You can do it natively if you like by adding the translations to the page templates but it can be quite a bit of work. We do that here: https://www.themountieshop.ca/

Another good option is a service called Global Nimbus. It can automatically do the translations for you:

http://apps.miva.com/website-translation-and-international-optimization.html

[tpav]

Hi Brennan.

I'm assuming you handled the language toggle within the template code with conditionals? I'd be interested to know because we always have a need for bilingual stores and up until now I've always just used 2 stores running parallel (English and French versions). Is there any documentation as to how to do this?

Thanks.

Tony Pavao
BrandAlliance

[jfazar]

Yes Brennan, I'd love to hear more about how you accomplished this. I was really hoping someone here had easily incorporated Google Translate to handle this.

[Brennan]

Google Translate is a good tool as well. Its implementation is done by adding some JavaScript to the site, typically in the global footer.

https://translate.google.com/manager/website/

The native way involves setting basket custom fields (or cookies) and then adding conditional statements to the site.


For example:

Pass a parameter to let the customer choose a language:

http://www.domain.com/?lang=en

http://www.domain.com/?lang=fr

Then in the html profile tag (just because it gets run first) you would have code like this to set the language:

<mvt:if expr="g.lang EQ 'en'">
    <mvt:item name="customfields" param="Write_Basket( 'language', 'english' )" />
<mvt:elseif expr="g.lang EQ 'fr'">
    <mvt:item name="customfields" param="Write_Basket( 'language', 'french' )" />
</mvt:if>

<mvt:comment>Read Custom Basket Field, Set Global Variable, english is default if no language set</mvt:comment>
<mvt:item name="customfields" param="Read_Basket( 'language', g.language )" />
<mvt:if expr="ISNULL g.language">
    <mvt:assign name="g.language" value="'english'" />
</mvt:if>

Finally, throughout your site where you want to change languages you wrap the test in this conditional:

<mvt:if expr="g.language EQ 'english'">
    Buy Now!
<mvt:elseif expr="g.language EQ 'french'">
    Achetez maintenant!
</mvt:if>

For product related data, we'll store translations in custom product fields and use a similar conditional as above to display one custom fields vs another.

[jfazar]

Wowsers, I can stumble my way around miva code but this will be a challenge for me for sure! I'll have to research this more and see if it's something I can do on my own or if it's something I'd have to farm out. Thanks!

[William Davis]

Is this still the only and/or feasible option for a multi-lingual Miva store?