Faculty/Staff Directory is a great product for adding profiles of people (faculty, staff, graduate students...) to an academic website built with Plone. Most academic institutions outside English-speaking countries need to provide this information in at least two languages. Faculty/Staff Directory is fully compatible with LinguaPlone, so can be used to provide bi- or multilingual profiles. However, making a multilingual Faculty/Staff Directory differs from the creation of regular content using LinguaPlone in a couple of ways. This post explains the steps required.

The two issues that arise when making a multilingual directory are

• you have to sort out the names, languages and translation links of the sub-folders that get created automatically when a directory is created
  
• translating a person creates a new site member, so you have to allow the real-life person to manage both site members' information (and make it clear which ID they should use to log in).
  

For clarity, in this post I describe a two-language site. I call one of the languages the Canonical Language and the other the Translation Language. The Canonical Language is the language you create content in first, and the Translation Language is the language into which you then translate content.

1. Create a directory. Set the language of the directory to the Canonical Language (click Edit, then the Categorization tab). This may not be necessary depending on your site's language settings.

Creating a directory creates sub-folders for Faculty, Staff, Graduate Students etc. Check that the language of each of these is also set to the Canonical Language.

2. Translate the directory into the Translation Language.

3. Translating the directory has once again created sub-folders for Faculty, Staff, Graduate Students etc. Translate the names of these sub-folders and set the language of each to the Translation Language.

4. Set links between each of the sub-folders in the Canonical and Translation Language Directories. e.g. Go to Faculty in the Canonical Language Directory, click Translate/Manage Translations, and set the Faculty sub-folder in the Translation Language Directory as the translation.

5. Now add users to the Canonical Language Directory.

6. Translate the users. Faculty/Staff Directory doesn't do language-independent fields so you have to upload photos etc. again, but everything works.

7. Give the Canonical Language Person edit rights over the Translated Person. Click on the Translated Language Person, click the Share tab, find the Canonical Language Person, and give them edit rights.