How to: Translating language for multiple products/categories

Question

My current setup is like this (new install).

• main website
  • main website store
    • store view English
    • store view German

Using Magmi, I know how to create my category structure (on the fly) - and how to add my 100 products to the default category.

However, how should I handle it, when I want to have my same product catalog translated into German when that store view is selected?

From what I can tell, this is a two part problem.

1. How to handle from a Magento perspective:

   • Do I create two unique root categories for each language and duplicate the product list into each?
   • Do I have one list/category, by somehow manage the translation for name and description somewhere else?? ..... I'm a bit lost!

2. How to then manage that with Magmi... but maybe its better to resolve point 1 first. Hopefully it becomes clear and simple to me by then :)

Thank you!

Answer 1

Most folks have the same products, but change the field values based on the "store view". For example:

• Catalog, Manage Products, and set the "store view" to "All Store Views".
• Add Product, and fill in the values with the "default" language. Save.
• Open the same product again, then select the "store view" of the alternative language. Un-check the values that need to change, and update those. Save.

You should now have the same product in both stores. And because you added values for both "default" and "2nd language" those will be shown appropriately when a customer selects a language.

Answer 2

OK, I was able to solve this by trial and error.

Using Magmi, you use the standard columns such as:

sku category_reset websites name attribute_set type store categories weight price qty description short_description status tax_class_id visibility

and for one product, you enter it twice - changing the name and description to the translated versions. Of course, you also need to change the store to German in the 2nd entry.

The big catch - which I somehow missed in all my googling, was you also need to include the url_key field - and manually set this for the two languages (ie, product1-english, product1-german). This is the part that will complete the translation functionality.

I think you might also need to hard code the url-path, but I haven't tested that yet.

I hope this helps someone - as it drove me crazy for the last 4 hours :)