Multilingual Site

A two-language site (English and German) with side-by-side content and translated menus.

File tree #

example-site/
├── config/
│   └── _default/
│       ├── hugo.toml
│       ├── module.toml
│       ├── languages.toml
│       ├── menus.toml
│       └── params.toml
└── content/
    ├── _index.md
    ├── _index.de.md
    ├── about.md
    └── about.de.md

Configuration #

# config/_default/hugo.toml

baseURL = "https://example.com/"
title = "Example site"
enableRobotsTXT = true
defaultContentLanguage = "en"

# config/_default/module.toml

[[imports]]
path = "github.com/gohugo-ananke/ananke/v2"

# config/_default/languages.toml

[en]
languageName = "English"
languageCode = "en-gb"
weight = 1
title = "Example site"

[de]
languageName = "Deutsch"
languageCode = "de-de"
weight = 2
title = "Beispielseite"

# config/_default/menus.toml

[[en.main]]
name = "About"
pageRef = "/about/"
weight = 10

[[de.main]]
name = "Über uns"
pageRef = "/about/"
weight = 10

# config/_default/params.toml

[ananke]
show_recent_posts = false

Sample content #

+++
title = "Welcome"
+++

This is the English homepage.

+++
title = "Willkommen"
+++

Das ist die deutsche Startseite.

The about page is translated the same way: content/about.md and content/about.de.md.

What it looks like #

Hugo serves English at the site root and German under /de/. A language switcher appears in the header, offering only the languages that have a translation of the current page. The menu labels are localised per language.

Common adjustments #

Override theme interface strings per language in i18n/en.toml / i18n/de.toml (see Multilingual and i18n).
Set a per-language read_more_copy under each language’s params.
Add more languages by adding more tables to languages.toml.