Multilingual sites with only partially shared content

[pmkpmk]

Hi there,

after reading a lot of threads dealing with multilingual sites, I still see my specific problem not covered. On all the posts I read so far, the WHOLE content of the site needs to be displayed in different languages.

My problem is slightly different:

I need to cover Englisch and German and - as a new language - Dutch on my site. However, the SHARED content varies from language to language.

The German pages cover 90% of the whole site.
The English pages cover only 60% of the whole site, but there are 10% content EXCLUSIVELY on the English section.
The new Dutch section will cover about 75% of the German section.

Maybe the ASCII-graphics will work:

GER: __################## 
ENG: ############________ 
NED: __###############___ 
ALL: _1_2_3_4_5_6_7_8_9_0 
 

So I only have 50% of the whole site shared with ALL languages, 10% purely in English and ~15% purely in German.

So what I CAN'T DO is building a redundant structure and offer the whole site-tree in 3 languages. Also language-selection by cookie is a challenge. A user can't browse to a random page and expect this page to be available in any of these three languages.

However, buildung three completely unconnected sites (excepet for a doorway-page) sounds like quite a task, confusing visitors and attracting errors as well.

Any advice?

[Sinner_G]

Have you thought on building a DB-driven site? There you could define some rules, like if there is no German content for a particular page it would display the English content.

[heini]

Hmm - but where is the problem?
If you build the site with the languages in subfolders or subdomains, you could easily have seperate navigation for each language.
Part of that navigation would be links, with the usual flags for example, to the starting page of the other languages.

There are more interlinking possibilities - important however would be to have a consistent navigation inside the languages.

[pmkpmk]

Sinner_G: I'm in the process of switching our Content Management System (see my other thread on this - maybe you have some tips here). The new one will for sure be DB-driven. However the pages which are NOT multilingual are only available in one language for a purpose. E.g. the 10% pages available only in English have NO MEANING whatsoever for German or Dutch visitors. Which leads to...

heini: The consistent navigation is exactly the problem. There CAN'T BE a consistent navigation due to the above mentioned problem. There can only be a consistent navigation INSIDE a single language. So for a visitor who comes from the English pages to the German pages, it will most likely confuse him to find a more or less completely different site structure. Maybe he thinks we want to hide things from him (which we actually want to do if you stretch the meaning of "hiding" a bit). But of course we don't want him to THINK this!

Mhmm... maybe I can't explain my problem properly. Or maybe it really isn't a problem after all?

[pmkpmk]

OK, my mind is a bit clearer now. The whole problem is that I want to reconstruct the underlying architecture of the site, but KEEP my SE-rankings AND don't confuse the visitors.

The OLD layout used filenames like this

mydomain.com/html/contact_d.html (in German)
mydomain.com/html/contact_e.html (in English)
mydomain.com/html/spezialangebot.html (German-only page)
mydomain.com/html/special_offer.html (English only page)

For the NEW layout I think along something like this:

mydomain.com/de/contact.html (in German)
mydomain.com/en/contact.html (in Englisch)
mydomain.com/nl/contact.html (in Dutch)
mydomain.com/de/spezialangebot.html (German-only page)
mydomain.com/en/special_offer.html (English-only page)
mydomain.com/nl/speciaal_anbeding.html (Dutch-only page)

I guess I will need an entry- or doormap-page:

mydomain.com/index.html

Which will switch among the three languages, but each language will have it's own start page:

mydomain.com/de/index.html (German start page)
mydomain.com/en/index.html (English start page)
mydomain.com/nl/index.html (Dutch start page)

By this, I can have a complete indepenedent navigation in the three different language branches.

Now for switching the language I can make crosslinks on all common pages, and on pages which are only available in one language the language-switch-function will direct the visitor to the top page.

Does this make sense?