Multilingual site from the start - tips / advice please

Want advice and common mistakes to avoid..

[Mark_A]

Am starting to plan an international site, to be multilingual from scratch.

Site will sell multiple items to a similar type of target customers in various countries the main (but not only) difference being language. All items and pages information etc would be wanted to be native translated or tweaked for local preferenced into local languages, initially major European languages and english for UK, US and others.

I am just starting to plan out requirements and wanting to think of as many issues that could cause problems before going any further.

I anticipate the site would be served from one server with each page mirrored in different lingos but this is not necessarily required .. for example I imagine there should be a seperate domain per language (certainly .de .es .fr .com etc) which would default to that language option on all links.

Any tips from people who have done this before would be appreciated.

[vitaplease]

Mark_A,

for starters here are some threads, some of them with links to other threads..

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

good luck.

I would say different tld's is the absolute best.
You can then also rank in Google's "search only in pages from France" option.

[Mark_A]

Thanks vitaplease want to learn as much as possible before digging holes to climb into :-) will look at those posts shortly.

BTW I already read Eric Jarvis's interesting article on making his website multilingual. Lots of interesting points in there thanks Eric.

[Eric_Jarvis]

no problem Mark...sticky me if you ever need any further help...just don't ask me about how to do Unicode compatible pages for Indian languages...I'm still tearing my hair out on that one

now...back to the Swahili

[Mark_A]

Eric Jarvis wrote: now...back to the Swahili :-)

No way would I risk getting involved with that level of complexity at this stage plus I think 80% of global target customers for the site in question would be well enclosed by European Languages inc English.

There are lots of issues I will have to master to get this project to work well so I will be avoiding "non essentials" at this stage.

Eric will you be at the Pubconference?
It would be good to meet you face to face.

[Eric_Jarvis]

actually Swahili is fairly easy...at least it's a straight Latin alphabet :)

I'll be at the pub conference...with a colleague...and amenable to sharing any tips for that part of the proceedings in which I remain sufficiently sober to work in my second language...after a few oatmeal stouts I may only be able to speak in Gibberish

[Mark_A]

>>after a few oatmeal stouts may only be able to speak Gibberish <<

Thats fine then .. as I count Gibberish among my second languages :-)

I was expecting to try to keep fairly sober so as not to miss that "one" snippet of info which might transform me from ... (insert whatever you think after pubcon :-) Will look out for you there.