How Does it Work?

[Arial]

Hi :)

Does anyone used a multi-lingual site?

If I offered this option how would I deal with any queries if I dont understand the language.I`m wondering how this works.


Arial

[DuaneJackson]

I've worked on a few. Basically they are database driven and you have 2 or 3 sets of content, one for each language and the relevant content is pulled to the site for each user.

Not given the dealing with enquiries much though - good point!

<moved to IT and Internet>

[Arial]

Hi Duane

It`s something I think could possibly be of great benefit to my bizz.

I will be using different translations for some of my promotional literature, so I`m thinking of the potential for the website.

Arial

[DuaneJackson]

Sounds like a good idea. You should consider buying the foreign equivalents of your domain name, such as .de for germany. And then having your devlopers set up these domains to show your site content in the appropriate language.

This would work well for language switching from a user perspective and work a dream for the search engines.

d

[crus]

Hi,

I have managed several communications with people using babel fish translation.

It was only in french and german which I have a good grasp off but proved adequate for the purpose.

With regards to content, easiest thing is to substitue all navigaion text on the site as variables (array) and then simply load a different set of variables into the script dependent on location. this means you can update really quickly buy just adding another variable ().

eg

0=englih
1=french
2=german

$mysite_indexWelcome[0] = Welcome
$mysite_indexWelcome[1] = Bienvenue
$mysite_indexWelcome[2] = Wilkommen

You can then add languaes by simply population extra tiers of the array.

Also using subdomains can work well.

gb.mysite.com
fr.mysite.com
de.mysite.com

But yes buy the relevent tld's if you can!

D

[DuaneJackson]

We took a similar approach.

We used an external include for each language, so english.asp, french.asp and then defined each variable in there. It's a lot easier to add new languages that way rather than with arrays because each language is in a self contained file.

You'd then pull inbthe relevant file at the top of each page to define the language variables.

[crus]

Make sense,

I think it depends on the terms needed, I have run a 5 page site of one very small include powering the arrays, but yes if you had 100's of terms splitting to seperate conf incs would make sense.

D