Is there a way to translate front end forms/pages without translating the backend of Civi as well?

Question

We are on Drupal 7 and running Civi 5.41.2. We added Spanish to our localization settings as we host several events in Spanish and have a few Spanish-speaking staff. We have been expanding recently and find the need to have other languages. From what we have read, adding languages through localization settings adds a new table for each language and can cause detrimental database bloat if you use 5+ languages. We are thinking we will need 8+ if we want to have language options for every country we are in.

Is there a way to only translate the public facing pages and forms? Using localization seems to add translations of all backend content, which we don't need.

Answer 1

You can avoid the cost of the full multi-language set-up in certain situations; I think you can do what you want with language switcher URLs.

See blog at https://civicrm.org/blog/ayduns/language-switcher for more info, but in summary:

1. Visit Administer » Localisation » Language, Currency... and list the languages you need in the Available languages selector. Hit save.

2. Then, say you want to send a link to (European) Spanish speakers for an event booking page, get the event booking URL and append &lcMessages=es_ES Likewise for German speakers append &lcMessages=de_DE.

Users of those links will see translated versions of all CiviCRM interface texts. The content you enter (e.g. event title, description) will be as you entered it though, so for a Spanish event, type in Spanish!

This method will also use translated versions of confirmation emails etc. too, which is a bonus. However please note that the events system (as of 5.49) only supports one timezone, so dates and times will be shown in that configured timezone, which may differ.