Thai Language websites

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Thai Language websites

Need advice on how best to add to English Language site

Visit Thailand

5:13 am on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

We are now (thanks to an enormous lull in business = read SARS) translating all our pages on our sites into Thai and other languages. Thai first -

1) One website is already very large, and well ranked with well over 10,000 pages and growing daily. It is in English.

Should I put all the Thai pages in a url such as www.mydomain.com/th/thistranslatedpage or use another method?

2) What do I need to do exactly to ensure that the page appears in Thai as it should when uploaded? Any tags or anything?

3) Is there any way for the page / server to see automatically that a users browser is fixed on Thai and that would create a pop up if he visits the English equivalent to tell him 'hey this same page is available in Thai?'

Thanks for any help.

bill

5:51 am on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

1. I would suggest that you splurge and get a .th domain name to host that content. That will give you some advantage when it comes to local searches. I'm not up on the Thai market, but Google searches do prefer a local domain to some extent.

2. Add this to your pages:

<html lang="th">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-11">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="th">

I'm not sure what the best charset for Thai is, but TIS-620 looked like the standard. There's also windows-874 being used...

3. You could probably do some browser sniffing in JavaScript to see if the user's browser returned the language setting information.

Visit Thailand

11:15 am on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

Thanks Bill

I was planning on perhaps using the charset 874. What difference exactly do charsets make?

Also I was thinking of using fonts : MS Sans Serif, AngsanaUPC, Arial, Verdana

as the font face. Any other better ideas than that.

I understand what you say in terms of the .th domain and have considered it but prefer the idea of a department store with different levels rather than different urls. I need to think more about it I guess.

hpche

12:47 pm on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

I think tis-620 is indeed the standard and does work well, I don't know exactly what the difference between this and windows-874 is though. Either way I'd set the font size quite large as on some browsers/OS's I've noticed the text can get unreadably small.

You can determine the users language setting (to an extent) using the HTTP accept-language header, just test what it's set to with PHP or something similar.

bill

12:41 am on Apr 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

What difference exactly do charsets make?

This basically lets the browser decode the contents of your page. As long as you use a charset that is commonly used you shouldn't have any problems. With Japanese encoding there used to be some problems with Netscape browsers viewing Unicode character sets, but I think that today's browsers can handle just about anything you throw at them.

fonts

I would highly recommend using CSS for assigning fonts. Most Thai visitors to my sites seem to be on Windows systems so you'd probably be safe with default Windows fonts.

.th domain

I think you'll find that there are a lot of people on WebmasterWorld that prescribe to this route. I used to do a lot of my translated sites on subdirectories, but recently have been spending a lot of time switching them off to local domains. I really wish I had started out on separate domains in the first place...