Professional Webmaster Business Issues Forum

Where I work now, we do it the smart way. Our templates are all language-agnostic, and we keep all our phrases in an enormous XML file as we develop the interface. That file is parsed, compiled, and cached in a dictionary object so it's always in memory thus assembling the layout is super-quick. Since all parts of the site are modular and programmatically rendered (with aggressive caching), it's simple to build any page, passing "en-us" as a parameter.

You need to figure out early how you're going to architect the bilingual site. Develop your URL strategy. My favourite method is to build "en.example.com" and "fr.example.com", and for every page on the "en" there is an identical (but translated) one on the "fr". "www" redirects to "en" by default, but may redirect to "fr" if the user has a french cookie.

I once worked for a company that insisted that not only should the content be bilingual, but every part of the URL should as well. That meant that there was a page called "health-insurance.html" but the french version was called "lassurance-maladie.html". That was a nightmare, I kid you not (it was a 2000+ page static website built in FRONTPAGE.)

What Leosghost says is true. Québecois is about as similar to Francais as US English is to UK English. It's mostly the same. But the differences will be very apparent to a Québecois reader. Imagine you're reading copy full of references to "trousers" (pants), "jumpers" (sweaters), and "chips" (fries)... you just know that the copy was written by a Brit. Make sure you have a Québecois translator do your French for the .ca site.

Interlink the english and french versions diligently. Let each french page have a link to the english version, and vice-versa.

You can on some sites ( structure and design permitting ) mirror your entire nav ..either english top / french bottom or vice versa or english left column / french right etc ..you switch the text , images etc displayed in the middle ..

You can get more complex ..but even a simple version of the above structure once set up will rank on page one for years ( through all dances and algo moves and across all engines ) ..

I built my first ever site this way ..targeted 50 single keywords and 100 double keyword phrases ..site has 100 pages in each language ..has never left pages 1 to 3 on G or Y or the now Bing for any of them ..