| de | en |



tl;dr

A multilingual blog with Jekyll is possible, but needs a bit of manual work.

Root cause

When I restarted blogging in 2020 I wrote exclusively in English. However there are always people who come into the field for whom this might be another fence that’s keeping them out.

I changed my mind and started translating my posts to at least one other language. I wrote about how easy it is to translate a few lines of prose back in 2021.

Sources for Jekyll

While the Jekyll documentation is not at all bad, for someone who is new to the ecosystem, you might know where to start searching - and for what.

Luckily there is almost always “someone who’s done it before”. In this case this someone is Anthony Granger who wrote about this very topic in 2016.

So this was my starting point.

Piecing things together

I just took what Anthony used as code and blatantly copied it over to my instance of Jekyll and tried to build the thing.

Unfortunately without much success. So I backed out all the changes and tried them step by step.

Configuration

Luckily the first thing I tried already worked, or at least let me build the blog without errors. It was the change to defaults section of the _config.yml which for me now looks like this

defaults:
    -
     scope:
         path: ""
     values:
         author: "msdeibel"
         layout: Layout
         language: en
         base-url: "/"
    -
     scope:
         path: de
     values:
         author: "msdeibel"
         layout: Layout
         language: de
         base-url: "/de/"

This basically tells Jekyll to look for markdown files to compile in the /_posts and /de/_posts path.

Post head

Also the head of my posts now contains a fixed start to automagically find and link to the corresponding post in the other language, should it exists.

My markdown for this is

---
layout: post
title:  "Multilingual blog in Jekyll"
date:   2022-05-03 19:04:00 +0100
categories: blogging technology jekyll hacking
postLink: multilingual
---
{% assign relatedPosts=site.documents | where:"postLink", page.postLink | sort: 'language' %}

<div class="language">
|
    {{% for p in relatedPosts %}}
      <a class="{{ p.language }}" href="{{ site.base-url }}{{ p.url }}">{{ p.language }}</a> |
    {% endfor %}
</div><br/>
<hr>
<br/>

The postLink is something I copied from Anthony. The part below the frontmatter I had to slightly modify compared to his code. This is due to the different versions of Jekyll we use - I guess.

With this part in place the compiler checks for related posts with the same postLink entry in other scopes of the instance and creates the link based on the attributes in the other post.