I am developing an accommodation booking website on Joomla 3.4.3 and i have installed Falang. My website must have two languages, default is English(en-GB) and translated to Afrikaans(af-ZA).
Before i go further into translating content for Falang, i want to find out what the 'Best Practice' for creating a Multi-lingual website currently is. I know that Falang is a great option(free or premium), but does Joomla 3.4.3 have the same capability?
I read that in order to offer multi-language with the built-in language switching functionality of Joomla, one would need to duplicate ALL content(Menus, Articles, etc.) and translate to the respective languages. After following multiple tutorials which may have been outdated, i got the built-in functionality to (sort of) work.
With Falang, it is basically the same process, just made a bit easier by allowing the user to do all translations in one area(Components-> Falang-> Translation-> And select the required content and language.)
Questions:
1- Is my above statement true in terms of Joomla and Falang multi-language functionality?
2- Has Joomla 3.4 made it easier to create multi-language websites without having to use 3rd party software? i.e.: Is there a new, easy way to work with Joomla multi-language? Or is it still the same old procedure?
3- Would it be safe to say that using Falang would still be the best option? (between Joomla 3.4 language switching and Falang)
4- Does anyone know of a Joomla Extension that can automatically translate newly added content without Admin having to translate the information?
5- Would Google Translate be an option to use instead of Falang?