Magento is a great platform if you want to serve up your site in multiple languages. Magneto makes it easy to translate many elements of your site and there are two different ways to do it.
Inline Translations
With a few quick changes you can enable inline translations in Magento. This will highlight every translatable portion of your site with a red box and you can directly edit those elements to say whatever you like. This method is incredibly easy, but the changes can be difficult to track and you wouldn't want to have to translate an entire site this way. Use this approach if you have just a few one-off changes to make.
Language Packs
If you want to automatically change every single translatable element of your site to another language Magento offers up language packs that make it easy to do so. There are a few steps you need to follow, so pay attention...
Set Up Store Views
In the Magneto Admin Panel start by setting up a store view for each different language you want to support. Generally people have their site, then a store per currency they want to support, then store views per language they want to support on that currency. If you only want to have one currecnty and one language this will be a very short step.
Download A Language Pack
Find the language pack you want to install by visiting Magento's Translation Page. You can pick from over a hundred languages so you'll probably find the one you're looking for. Once you do click on the "Select" button and you'll be taken to that language's page. Just download the "Package" and you're on to the next step.
Copy the Files to Magento
All language files need to be copied to the "App" folder in your server. Fire up your favorite FTP program and copy all the files you just downloaded to their corresponding folders on your server.
Set the Language in the Magento Admin Panel
Log in to your Magento Admin Panel and navigate to System > Configuration > General > General > Locale Options > Locale and set your store view (make sure you're in the right one by selecting it in the upper left corner) to whatever language it is you just downloaded. Save your changes, flush your cache, and you're ready to go.
You can see that there are definitely more steps involved with the second language translation approach, but in return for your extra effort you can get hundreds of terms pre-translated for you. Plus, if you see something is missing you can always add new translations to the CSV files you found in the language pack so that you can have a fully customized solution.
