Navigation menu in multilingual site

[msoutopico]

I have a multilingual site, for now only in English and Russian. The main mkdocs.yml in the root directory says:

theme:
  language: en
. . .   
extra:
  generator: true
  alternate:
    - name: English
      link: /omegat-guides/en/
      lang: en
    - name: Russian
      link: /omegat-guides/ru/
      lang: ru

I have created two new subfolders inside docs: en and ru. I have moved all files in docs to en and I'm now translating all contents to create target-language equivalents under ru.

After doing that, I had to update the nav section, so that all paths to files start with en:

nav:
  - Contents: en/index.md
  - Foo section:
      - Foo: en/foo/index.md
      - Bar: en/foo/bar.md

The navigation menu English version looks now as before, but the Russian version doesn't have one, see https://capstanlqc.github.io/omegat-guides/ru/translation/.

I was expecting that the navigation menu would be reproduced in all languages, with the theme replacing the language tag (e.g. using ru instead of en in all paths).

Since the navigation menu must also be translatable, I have tried adding the nav section in a mkdocs.yml file inside both en and ru folders, but it doesn't seem to work.

Any advice is most welcome.

[msoutopico]

I think a more summarized version of the question is how I can move the nav configuration to each subfolder:

mkdocs.yml <- all configuration other than the subfolder-specific nav configuration
subfolder1:
- foo
- bar
- mkdocs.yml <- contains nav configuration of subfolder1
subfolder2:
- foo
- bar
- mkdocs.yml <- contains nav configuration of subfolder2

while building the site from the root directory that contains all subfolders.

[squidfunk]

Our recommendation is to split your site into multiple MkDocs projects, one per language, and then build them either separately, or together with the projects plugin (currently reserved to sponsors). Something like: multi-language-blog.zip

[msoutopico]

Thank you @squidfunk. I was looking into that kind of architecture, but what about deploying to Github? Would it still be possible to publish in Github Pages as https://capstanlqc.github.io/omegat-guides/ when I do mkdocs gh-deploy from the root directory?

[squidfunk]

Yes, as the projects plugin builds all projects together into a single project. We're deploying our examples repository that way.

[msoutopico]

Thanks @squidfunk I'll study that repo. Do I understand correctly that I could use the projects plugin for as long I or my organization sponsor mkdocs-material? In other words, do I need to keep the sponsorship of $15 a month for as long as I want to use the plugin? Thank you

[squidfunk]

Yes, or at least as long as you want us to fix bugs for you that might appear, as we're not perfect.