Site with multiple languages

How do I have a site in 2 different languages?

[dwhitesock]

I am designing a site that would like the default to be read in English with the option for Norwegian. So how do I do this? Do I have to produce to seperate sites, one with the translation. Do I have to actually manually translate it or is there a script that will translate.

This is new ground for me. Thanks for your help.

[john_pinx]

Hola - There are lots of technical ways to do this, but the easiest is to put the website into the second language, and then link the two sites, all on the same domain. I actually use PHP to do sites for other people to translate into whatever language they like, but the basic principle is the same, the different language versions exist together and are linked. If you have access to your dns service, you could do what I do and have a sub-domain with a full A record pointing at one language. So www.norsk.domain.no would be the site in Norwegian, and www.english.domain.com would be the same site in English, etc. That way you can submit the two sites to the respective language versions of the search engines. :-) Hope this helps. JohnP.

[raywood]

The question about programs to do translations comes up every couple of months. Human language is far too complex for ordinary computer technology. Even super-computers have trouble translating. You could be very embarassed if you trust software to translate your website.

[dwhitesock]

If I understand correctly, I should build two seperate sites. What if just the non-english version was a subdomain of the english, plain and simple?

This client does not really care where they fit in the SE's, they are a church so they don't have the resources for it. Plus, trying to rank them high in Norway will be a task, they have a very popular name.

[john_pinx]

Raywood is right - forget the "auto-translate" and get real people to do it. :-)

I was suggesting sub-domaining the translations, so the "favourite" language would be on the main domain, and the translation on the sub. Something like www.mydomain.com for the mainlanguage version, and www.language.mydomain.com for the second language. As I said - it depends on what access you have to the domain zonefile. I am a member of a server co-op and we have total access to everything :-) Sticky me if you want to know more.

[dwhitesock]

Thank you very much for the help.