It is always an advantage to display your site content in different languages. Let’s install a language to see how the web site front end can appear in a language other than English. The extensions for almost all languages are freely available on the Internet. For this example, let’s download the extension for French. The archive file for the French language is fr-FR_joomla_lang_full_3.4.1v2.zip, which you can find at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/french/frs/. Download it to a local disk drive.
To install this language, open the Extension Manager by selecting Extensions ➤ Extension Manager. In the Install tab that is opened by default, click the Browse button to locate the French language archive file and click the Upload File & Install button to install this language in your web site, as shown in Figure 10-37.
You’ll see the message Installing Package Was Successful, confirming that the French language pack was installed (see Figure 10-38).
The Language Manager that you open by selecting Extensions ➤ Language Manager confirms the successful installation of the French language by displaying two language options: English and French (see Figure 10-39). The English language is still set as default language.
On the front end of the site, every content will appear in English. Even if you search for a keyword, the output that will appear is in English. For example, if you search for the keyword camera on the site, you’ll see the output shown in Figure 10-40.
Back to the administration interface (in Language Manager). To make your site content appear in French, you need to set it as the default language of the site. To do so, select the French language option from the list and click the asterisk (star) in the Default column. The French language asterisk, which was without color is now gold, as shown in Figure 10-41. The golden star next to French confirms that the site’s default language is now French instead of English.
Consequently, the front side content of the site is translated to French. With French declared as the default language of the site, if you search for the camera keyword, you get the results translated into French, as shown in Figure 10-42. Notice that everything, including the text on the search button, changes to French. The content of the articles, however, does not change. To translate the language of the articles, you have to install translation extensions, which you will learn how to do in the next section.
With this procedure, you can translate your web site content into any one language. Also, translation can be performed from the administrative interface. How about translating the site content from the front side of the site, which enables visitors to choose the language to translate to?
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition