Joomla tutorials by Joomlaboratory

Joomla can run a multilingual website without a single extension. Language packs, content languages, translated menus, a language switcher, linked translations and hreflang tags for search engines are all part of core. What trips people up is not a missing feature but the order of the steps and a few settings that are easy to miss.

This guide builds a real English and Greek site on a clean Joomla 6.2 installation, step by step. Every screenshot comes from that site, including the small surprises we hit along the way. At the end you will find the features you get, the things to be careful with, and a checklist you can reuse for any language.

1. How multilingual works in Joomla

Joomla's model is simple once you know the parts. Each translation is a separate item (a separate article, menu item or module) tagged with a language, and translations are linked together. Five building blocks make it work:

• Language packs translate Joomla's own interface: buttons, labels, dates, messages. Without the Greek pack, a Greek page would still say "Written by" and "Read more".
• Content languages are the languages your content can be in. Each one has a URL Language Code (the /en/ or /el/ prefix), a flag and a status.
• The Language Filter plugin switches the site into multilingual mode. It adds the language prefix to URLs and shows visitors only the content, menus and modules of the current language (plus everything set to All).
• Associations link an item to its translations. They let the language switcher jump from /en/about-us to /el/sxetika-me-emas instead of the Greek home page, and they produce the hreflang tags.
• The Language Switcher module shows the flags or language names to your visitors.

Any item set to language All appears in every language. That is useful for things that never change, such as a login form, but it also means that its text is never translated.