Multilanguage

Create multiple language versions of the same page

Options See on deno.land

extensions string[]

The list of extensions used for this plugin

Default: 
[ ".html" ]
languages string[]

Available languages

defaultLanguage string

A prefix-free language

Description

This plugin provides some features to make easier the creation of multilanguage sites.

Installation

Import this plugin in your _config.ts file to use it:

import lume from "lume/mod.ts";
import multilanguage from "lume/plugins/multilanguage.ts";

const site = lume();

site.use(multilanguage({
  languages: ["en", "gl", "es"], // Available languages
}));

export default site;

Due to the automatic alternate links generating, the plugin must be registered after all URL modifiers to work probably.

import lume from "lume/mod.ts";
import basePath from "lume/plugins/base_path.ts";
import multilanguage from "lume/plugins/multilanguage.ts";

site.use(basePath()); // modify url
site.use(multilanguage({
  languages: ["en", "gl", "es"],
}));
// site.use(basePath()); // this modification will not be applied

export default site;

Create pages in multiple languages

This plugin uses the variable id (combined with type if it's defined) to detect the different translations of the same page. For example, let's say we have the following two pages:

---
lang: en
id: about
url: /about-me/
---

# About me

---
lang: gl
id: about
url: /acerca-de-min/
---

# Acerca de min

The plugin interprets these two pages as the same content but in different languages, because they have the same id (about) and the same type (undefined).

The pages will be exported as /en/about-me/, /gl/acerca-de-min/. Note that the /en/ and /gl/ prefixes are automatically added.

It's possible to configure one language as default, so any page in this language won't have the prefix in the URL. For example, consider the following configuration:

site.use(multilanguage({
  languages: ["en", "gl", "es"], // Available languages
  defaultLanguage: "en", // The default language
}));

Now, the pages will be exported as /about-me/ and /gl/acerca-de-min/. The english version doesn't have the /en/ prefix because it's the default language.

Because this plugin detects the different language version for every page, it inserts automatically the <link rel="alternate" hreflang="{lang}" href="{url}" /> elements in each pages. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>About me</title>

    <link rel="alternate" hreflang="gl" href="/gl/acerca-de-min/" />
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
  </body>
</html>

Note

The attribute lang is inserted automatically in the html element if it's missing.

Create a language switcher menu

The plugin also exposes the alternates variable, that you can use to build a menu to change the language of the current page. This is an example in Vento:

<ul class="languages">
{{ for alt of alternates }}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ alt.url }}" {{ if alt.lang == lang }}aria-current="page"{{ /if }}>
      {{ alt.title }} ({{ alt.lang }})
    </a>
  </li>
{{ /for }}
</ul>

This code outputs something like:

<ul class="languages">
  <li>
    <a href="/about-me/" aria-current="page">
      About me (en)
    </a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="/sobre-min/">
      Sobre min (gl)
    </a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="/acerca-de-mi/">
      Acerca de mí (es)
    </a>
  </li>
</ul>

Link to a page in current language

The easiest way to get the URL of a specific page in the current language is to use the id and search.page() with current lang as a filter.

---
id: home
---

{{ set about = search.page('id=about lang=' + lang) }}

<a href="{{ about.url }}">About</a> <!-- This will always output the URL translated in the current lang -->

---
id: about
---

<p>This is an About page</p>

Sitemap

The Sitemap plugin is compatible with this plugin, so the generated sitemap will contain the translated versions of the pages.

This plugin supports the x-default value for unmatches languages. This option is useful to specify a fallback page for users whose language settings don't match any of your site's localized version.

  • You can link to a language selector page.
  • Or to any of the translated version of the current page.

To generate a x-default link, create the unmatchedLangUrl value in your front matter:

lang: gl
unmatchedLangUrl: /language-selector/

In this example, this page will have a x-default link to the /language-selector/ page. You can save this variable in a _data file to apply this value to all pages.

Alternatively, you can specify one of the available languages as the x-default language:

lang: gl
unmatchedLangUrl: en

In this example, the x-default link will have the URL to the English version.

Multilanguage data

With this plugin, you can have your data in different languages that will be correctly resolved according to the language of each page. For example, let's say we have the following _data.yml file for our site with the languages en, gl and es:

site_name: The Óscar's blog
gl:
  site_name: O blog de Óscar
es:
  site_name: El blog de Óscar

The variable site_name has a different value for the languages gl and es. Any variable stored inside a variable named like one of the available languages, is considered a translation. We can use the site_name variable in our pages and the value will be different depending on the page's language:

---
lang: en
---

<h1>{{ site_name }}</h1> <!-- Outputs: The Óscar blog -->

---
lang: gl
---

<h1>{{ site_name }}</h1> <!-- Outputs: O blog de Óscar -->

---
lang: es
---

<h1>{{ site_name }}</h1> <!-- Outputs: El blog de Óscar -->

It's also possible to use objects to replace specific inner values. For example:

site:
  name: The Óscar's blog
  logo: /logo.png

# Translate only site.name, but leave site.logo as is
gl:
  site:
    name: O blog de Óscar

es:
  site:
    name: El blog de Óscar

Multilanguage pages from a single file

With this plugin it's possible to export the same page multiple times, once per language. To configure a page as multilanguage, just set in the lang variable to an array with the available languages. For example:

# This page is in 3 different languages: English, Galician, and Spanish.
lang: [en, gl, es]
title: About me
layout: base-layout.vto

Lume will generate three pages, one per language, prefixing the output path of each page with the language code:

/en/about-me/index.html
/gl/about-me/index.html
/es/about-me/index.html

We can assign different data per language:

lang: [en, gl, es]

# Common values for all languages
layout: base-layout.vto
title: About me
url: /about-me/

# Galician translations
gl:
  title: Acerca de min
  url: /sobre-min/

# Spanish translations
es:
  title: Acerca de mí
  url: /acerca-de-mi/

Warning

This only works at page level.

Multilanguage + pagination

If your site is using the paginate plugin, this is an example showing how to apply multilanguage:

export const layout = "layouts/my-layout.vto";

export default function* ({ search, paginate }) {
  const langs = ["gl", "en"];

  for (const lang of langs) {
    const pages = search.pages(`type=article lang=${lang}`);

    yield* paginate(pages, {
      url: (n) => `/${lang}/articles/${n}/`,
      each(page, number) {
        page.lang = lang;
        page.id = `articles-page-${number}`;
      },
    });
  }
}
  • In this example, the generator is generating all pages in all languages.
  • In the each option, we are adding the lang and id values to the new pages.
  • The id ensures that the page /gl/articles/1/ and /en/articles/1/ are treated as translations of the same content, because both have the same id.