{"id":6379,"date":"2018-01-15T08:05:20","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T07:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eurotext-ecommerce.com\/en\/?p=6379"},"modified":"2024-09-30T08:49:15","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T06:49:15","slug":"how-does-internationalization-work-with-magento-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eurotext.de\/en\/blog\/how-does-internationalization-work-with-magento-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How does internationalization work with Magento? \u2013 Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
The technical implementation of internationalization in e-commerce<\/strong>: what is the best way to go about it? In the second part of our article on the shop software Magento<\/strong>, we focus on the problems<\/strong> that can arise when working with Magento and how to avoid some of the pitfalls. We also answer the question of how suitable Magento is for multilingual e-commerce projects.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/div> <\/div> Based on what we learned in the first part of our Magento article<\/a>, the shop software seems to be very well thought-out and well developed. The developers at Magento have obviously put a lot of effort into developing a system that is perfectly primed for multilingualism<\/strong> and cross-border commerce<\/strong>. However, Magento retailers too are confronted with problems and challenges in everyday use. We would like to introduce you to some of these problems, all of which can be attributed to very different causes:<\/p>\n Most languages function according to similar principles and can be integrated seamlessly into Magento. For the widely used languages in particular, it is often enough to simply install a well translated language file.<\/strong> But the more complex or “exotic” a language, the more complicated it becomes. As an example, Magento recognizes only three shopping cart statuses: there are no<\/u> items, there is one<\/u> item or there are several<\/u> items in the shopping cart. There are, however, some languages that use multiple plural forms that cannot be reproduced using these three shopping cart statuses alone. Languages with unusual sentence structures face a similar problem. While placeholders<\/strong> can be moved around relatively freely within a sentence in Magento, you cannot just divide them up however you like. Editing the codebase is the only real solution to this problem. Another problem is that of languages that make use of multiple forms of address. The best example of this is German with its informal “du” and formal “Sie” forms. As Magento only supports one set of language files, the retailer has to decide on one of the two variations.<\/p>\n One linguistic problem that users are confronted with is completely of Magento’s own doing. Magento does not support language variants for CMS pages<\/strong>. While you can translate a product for all configured languages without any problems, CMS pages are not equipped with the same potential for multilingualism. If you want to display your “Legal notice” page in five different country shops, for example, you have to create five individual pages, fill these with the target-language text and then assign them to the corresponding store views<\/em>.<\/div> In addition, care must be taken to link the pages correctly. When changing languages, Magento does not normally change the URL key<\/strong>, it simply switches to the other language variant and retains the URL key (i.e. the file name). So if a customer changes to the German version of the “Legal notice” page from the English website, he or she will most likely end up on a 404 error page, because the German page is not called “Legal notice” but “Impressum”. Therefore, a redirect must be added to the CMS page from every language into every other language. This can quickly become confusing in shops with a large number of language variants. If you want to avoid this, you can give the pages the same page name in all languages, but this will give you problems with search engines<\/strong>. Rico Neitzel, who is regularly confronted with this problem, notes: “Magento is not a CMS. That’s just a fact.”<\/em><\/p>\n Rico Neitzel is all too aware of another Magento feature that has attracted criticism. In Magento 1, all used language files, including those from third-party modules, were stored in a special folder. Translating the entire shop was simply a matter of sending this folder to a translation agency. Since Magento 2<\/strong>, however, this central file repository no longer exists. This makes things easier for programmers because they can organize the language files according to their needs. It means a lot of extra effort during the translation process, however. Magento does allow you to export all texts in a CSV file. However, the content of this file is not structured. For large projects it is near impossible to attribute context to the individual segments of this huge file.<\/p>\n To top it all off, Magento also exports the system language. In most modules, the system language is English, but other languages can sometimes be found in the mix. B\u00fcro 71a has developed a solution on behalf of Eurotext AG, that at least partially addresses this problem, but the current status is not yet ideal.<\/p>\n Regardless of the shop system, one major translation challenge that many retailers forget about is images. Modern shops often harbor huge quantities of images. And it is not uncommon for them to contain text: banners, buttons, photos with integrated product names, warnings, dimensions. Some of these things need translating, others not.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/span>Challenges and Technical Limitations<\/h2>\n
<\/span>Special Linguistic Cases<\/h2>\n
<\/span>CMS Pages Require a Lot of Manual Work<\/h2>\n
<\/span>Problems Exporting Language Files<\/h2>\n\n
<\/span>Should You Translate Images?<\/h2>\n