Always keep admin UI in English when translating content

Question

How can I prevent the admin UI switching to a foreign language every time I translate a piece of content?

i.e. I'm editing a Menu item and I've clicked the Translate tab. I click 'Add' in the German row to add a translation.

However the link always begins /de, which means all the UI labels change as well - to get back to English I have to manually remove it from the address bar and (it seems) do so every single time.

Is there any way to turn this off?

I tried going to Detection and Selection (/admin/config/regional/language/detection) and checking 'Account Administation pages', or checking 'User' and promoting it to the top of the list, but this didn't seem to make any difference to the button URL or the form output.

Answer 1

This functionality is partially achievable since Drupal 8.6.4.

1. Navigate to Detection and selection (admin/config/regional/language/detection)
2. Adjust your settings accordingly. Be sure to activate "Account administration pages". Your content language detection methods are optional.

3. Edit your user profile and set your "Administration pages language" to English.

Now your Admin UI will stay in English no matter what the other language detection methods resolve to. That means while creating a translation, the interface will remain in English.

However, the unsupported part is keeping the Admin Toolbar in English when being redirected to the translated page on saving it. But when going back to the Admin UI it's in English again.

These issues are dealing with that: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2313309

And if you use the Admin Toolbar module: https://www.drupal.org/project/admin_toolbar/issues/3004575

UPDATE 2022 August

For a truly single-language admin toolbar, this patch (or the latest version thereof) needs to be applied, in addition to following the above mentioned steps.

Answer 2

This can be done from within the user edit page. I took the following steps from this link: https://www.drupal.org/node/2623206 [comment #8]

1- Enabled the Language module, and set-up one additional language.

2- I configure the administration language separate to the content language by below setting:

/admin/config/regional/language/detection:
Account administration pages: enabled

3-Admin -> Edit Profile -> Edit(Tab)

Answer 3

For people unable to edit content in different languages after following the steps suggested on answers here, please take a look at this link: https://www.drupal.org/docs/multilingual-guide/setting-the-language-for-administration-pages#s-translate-content-with-admin-pages-in-user-language

I was having the same issue (after doing the updates in /admin/config/regional/language/detection I was only able to see and edit nodes in English, even though I was using /fr in the URL for French content), but after checking the options suggested at the link above, the problem was fixed. I'm now able to select a preferred language in my user profile and edit both English and French content on my website.

Answer 4

• Go to /admin/config/regional/language/detection and check "Customize Content language detection to differ from Interface text language detection settings" That way it will distinguish between interface language and content language.