What babelquarto does (and does not do)

I am still in love with Quarto. Since discovering it, I have moved entirely to this format, and I use it for all the documents in my day-to-day work. Quarto therefore remains the engine that transforms source documents into the website’s pages. babelquarto adds the coordination needed to generate the different versions, organizing the rendering of each language and linking the corresponding pages. It does not translate content automatically: the Spanish and English texts are maintained in separate source files.

This distinction matters. Automating a website’s build process does not remove the need to review its translations, links, and references.

File organization

Spanish is the main language. Its pages retain the usual Quarto filenames, while the English translations add the .en suffix:

index.qmd
index.en.qmd

about/
├── index.qmd
├── index.en.qmd
├── resume.qmd
├── resume.en.qmd
├── outreach.qmd
└── outreach.en.qmd

The same structure is used for blog posts and project pages.

This convention keeps the two versions of a page together and gives babelquarto the pattern it needs to identify translations of documents in the main language. It also makes it easier to translate all the content while preserving the same format.

Language configuration

In _quarto.yml, Spanish is defined as the main language and English as an additional language:

lang: es

babelquarto:
  mainlanguage: es
  languages: [en]
  languagelinks: navbar
  languagecodes:
    - name: es
      text: "ES"
    - name:babelquarto::render_website(project_path = ".", site_url = "", preview = TRUE)
 en
      text: "EN"

mainlanguage identifies the main language; languages contains the additional languages, and languagecodes defines the labels visitors will see as they browse the website.

In the output, the Spanish version is placed at the site’s root and the English version under /en/. Equivalent pages therefore retain a recognizable structure:

/about/resume.html
/en/about/resume.html

Shared configuration and language-specific profiles

I have also separated the shared configuration from the settings specific to each version:

_quarto.yml
_quarto-es.yml
_quarto-en.yml

The main file contains the theme, resources, and general options. The language profiles define elements such as menu and footer text, while the _quarto-es.yml and _quarto-en.yml profiles allow those settings to be applied when rendering each language.

This avoids duplicating the entire configuration and makes it possible to change a visual feature just once for both versions.