Language selection plugin

I have a group that is starting to grow, and one option in elgg itself is the language selector, but the problem is that this only modifies a few of the primary menu items, everything else remains in English. Is anyone creating, or already released a language selector plugin for 1.8.X? Something that does real time translations or even translates before displaying the current page to the user? It has to default to English, but allow the end user to select Spanish and possibly a few other languages in the future.

The production server is running 1.8.1 and so far doing very well. We are running minimal plugins to start (shows 55 plugins, 48 active) but plan to add more as we see more updated/created for 1.8.

Any help with this would be much appreciated. I personally do not know any language but english, and just started using elgg so the programming of such a plugin is beyond me at the moment. So far all the plugins I see are for completely converting the entire site to other languages which we do not want to do for everyone, just give them the option (English and Spanish to start).

  • Do you have the entire language files for your language(apart from english)?

    Live translation as you mentioned, won't work for system messages.

    Search for the language packs for 1.8 and you will get many for sure. The complete french pack was released few days back. Try with that for starters.