Multilingual sites

Zola supports having a site in multiple languages.

🔗Configuration

To get started, you will need to add the languages you want to support to your config.toml. For example:

[languages.fr]
generate_feed = true # there will be a feed for French content
build_search_index = true
taxonomies = [
    {name = "auteurs"},
    {name = "tags"},
]

[languages.fr.translations]
summary = "Mon blog"

[languages.it]
# Italian language doesn't have any taxonomies/feed/search index

[languages.it.translations]
summary = "Mio blog"

# translations for the default language are not prefixed by languages.code
[translations]
summary = "My blog"

Note: By default, Chinese and Japanese search indexing is not included. You can include the support by building zola using cargo build --features indexing-ja --features indexing-zh. Please also note that, enabling Chinese indexing will increase the binary size by approximately 5 MB while enabling Japanese indexing will increase the binary size by approximately 70 MB due to the incredibly large dictionaries.

🔗Content

Once the languages have been added, you can start to translate your content. Zola uses the filename to detect the language:

  • content/an-article.md: this will be the default language
  • content/an-article.fr.md: this will be in French

If the language code in the filename does not correspond to one of the languages or the default language configured, an error will be shown.

If your default language has an _index.md in a directory, you will need to add an _index.{code}.md file with the desired front-matter options as there is no language fallback.

🔗Output

Zola outputs the translated content with a base URL of {base_url}/{code}/. The only exception to this is if you are setting a translated page path directly in the front matter.