Magento- Adding another language to your store

Today I am going to highlight one of Magento’s little used features.

I currently have two sites under development that are going to take advantage of multiple languages.

One will have a second store view in French and another will have a second store view in Spanish.

The fist step is to change the default store view name to English. Login into admin and go to the System>Manage Stores section.
Click on Store View Name for your default store. Change the store name to English. Then save.

Next step is to create the second store view, which will be Spanish.
Click on Create Store View button at top.
Enter your information for the Spanish store per image below:

Click on Save Store View and you should have a new Spanish store view.
On the front end, you will now see that there is a store switcher in the header area.

Now, we have two stores, one english and one spanish.
But as you can see, it’s not all working as it should.
If you go to the home page in the Spanish Store, we will get a 404.
You can fix that by assigning the home page to All Store Views, per below.

You will also need to go to Catalog>Manage Products and select all your products, then update attributes.
Then go to websites section, per below, and add product to website.


You should now see all your products showing in categories, regardless of what store view you are in.
We will cover products later.

If you take a quick look at your Spanish view store, you will notice that it’s not really in Spanish, it’s still in English.
That’s because you haven’t given Magento any translations for your Spanish store. That’s next.

Go to Magento’s Translations Page.
Search for your language pack then click on it to go to the pack’s download page.
You are now ready to download the Spanish pack, see below.

Save the es_MX folder to your desktop, and upload to your server in the app>locale folder.See below.


Now that you have installed the Spanish language page, it’s time to tell Magento about it.
Go to System> Config> General tab, then click on Locale Options tab.
In top left, select Current Configuration Scope, and select Spanish. See below.


Once you have selected Spanish store view, click on Locale Options.
Unselect Use Website checkbox and then use dropdown to select Spanish Mexico. See below.


Now that Magento knows about our Spanish language pack, it should be serving translated files in the front end.
Let’s see…

Finally, we will talk about product translations.
If you want to have Spanish in a product, for example, you will need to go to Catalog>Manage Products.
Select your product, then select Spanish store view in top left.
Add your Spanish translations to short description, for example, by unchecking ‘Use Default Value’ and then pasting in your Spanish translation. See below.

Here is result of that translation on front end…

If you have used static blocks, here is a post about using them to serve translated static blocks in your store- Serving Static blocks in different store views

I know that’s alot of steps, but it’s really amazing what we have just done.

We now have a multi-language store, serving different visitors, in their own tongue.
How cool is that? No es genial?
If you want to thank us for writing this post, you can buy us a round here and we’ll be eternally thankful.

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