Build a Multilingual Jekyll Site

Jekyll is a static website generator. It creates static HTML documents directly, making hosting a website as easy as setting up an HTTP server. Yet it is still very powerful: it can generate HTML documents from Markdown, which makes writing and formatting articles and posts easy and fun; it supports plugins that add more feature to itself, the generated site, or even both.

Thanks to plugin developers, we have multilingual plugins for Jekyll which allow us to make our site useful to more people in different parts of the world by presenting translated and localized contents. However, there are still a few things that require extra care and some possible improvements on the site’s user experience that are not offered by those plugins, which will be covered by the guides in this collection. We will walk through all the steps needed to set up a multilingual Jekyll site similar to the one you are currently viewing.

The multilingual plugin I will use for this collection is Polyglot. Of course, this is also the plugin that this site uses as of this collection is composed. I will discuss why I chose this plugin in a section in this collection.