Joomla! Documentation™

Tutorial
How to setup a Multilingual Joomla! Site

Articles in this Series

1. Introduction
2. Step 1: Installing a new language
3. Step 2: Creating a Content Language
4. Step 3: Enabling the Language Plugins
5. Step 4: Adding Multilingual Content
6. Step 5: Creating Menus for the Multilingual Content
7. Step 6: Duplicate your Template for each Language
8. Step 7: Adding a Language Switcher
9. Step 8: Exploring the multilingual site

Joomla! allows you to create easily a multilingual website, without having to install any third party extension. In this tutorial, you’ll find a complete walkthrough of the steps involved in creating a multilingual Joomla! site.

Step 6 - Duplicate your template for each language

We’ll now assign a template copy for each language. In this tutorial, we need a copy of the default template for the English content and one for the French content. In this way, we can assign different menus depending on the selected language (but not only, it also allows you to have different settings and styles according to the language).

• Navigate to Extensions → Templates.
• Select your default template and click on the Duplicate button.
  
• Edit the duplicated template and change the details according to the language. You can assign the language-specific menu and, depending of the template you’re using, you can assign a language to the override and much more.
• Repeat the above steps for the 2nd language.

Step 5 - Creating Menus for the Multilingual Content

Step 7 - Adding a Language Switcher