bilingual web-site

[floriauck]

hello everybody,

I would like to set up a bilingual site. I do web-design work in europe and in the us, so i would like to make the site available in german and in english. But, how can I do that? has anybody experience with that? Do I just build two sites, one host on .de and on on the .com domain and then use german and english?
is there maybe a cms tool that lets u use two languages for the same field, and then when updating i can update the german and the english? maybe something that translates automatically (yes, dream on.. hehe., i know) .. any help, ideas, links, thoughts are
appreciated..

thanks
florian

[chrisnrae]

"translates automatically"

As far as that goes, I would stay away from auto translators. They straight translate words and don't translate it for readability. A lot of times what it outputs makes no sense to the person in the translated language.

If you want to do a site in a second language, it either needs to be a language you are fluent in or you should be willing to hire someone who is to translate the site/content for you.

[bumpaw]

I was recently faced with a client wanting a French version of his English site. I found looking at examples of sites helpful especially this one on tourism in Quebec. tourism.gouv.qc.ca

[floriauck]

well, the translation is not the biggest problem for me, i am bilingual in german and english .. i guess my question is more the technical site! like again, is there a good cms that can handle two languages.. I agree, auto translaters really arent very good,

thanks for the example site.. .

[encyclo]

Automatic translation is almost always a disaster - there are few things more unprofessional than seeing garbled or unintelligable copy on a website - it gives the clear impression that you would not be able to work in that language. Unless you are completely fluent, then you should find a professional translator.

Are you aiming to attract work specifically in the US and Germany? If so, then you can either build one site with a .com address (well-accepted in both places) and detect the language preference, or you can run two interlinked sites as you say with different domain names.

Personally, I prefer the first option (and redirect the .de domain name to the German pages of the main site). One important feaure is to be able to switch directly to the same page in the other language without having to navigate via the home page. Having one site shows your international status, and keeps things coherent. the Typo3 CMS can do bilingual sites well.

Finally, don't use a "language choice" splash page - detect the user's preferred language from the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE value, and serve as appropriate - but make sure the person can then change to the other language if they prefer.

[floriauck]

encyclo, great info, thank you very much!
i will look into that cms system that you talked about. this was very helpful,

thanks and appreciate,
florian

[danieljean]

damn, encyclo mentionned my pet peeve. And he's got it right too: my browser tells your server what language I can accept- don't ask me again!

If I'm not happy with that, I should accept a cookie, or change my browser settings.

[Leosghost]

disagree totally on language sniffing ..I live in France and am perfectly fluent in french ..I know many anglophones who live here and cannnot read better french than to read road maps to navigate a car ..Give them a landing page based on ip sniffing and you just p*ss them off ( most of the time they think they hit a french only site and they're backed out and gone )...for good ...
Give em English "lander" with "flag switching" ..much better for serps also ...

BTW dont forget to change the language type in your html doctype ...Amazing the number of pages I see that are made in wysiwyg ( default page creation "EN" ) and doing less well than they could be in language specific serps..

[esllou]

agreed totally. I live in Italy and have lost count of the amount of times a big site like time or CNN or espn or whoever will throw me automatically onto their Italian or European version which is the last thing I wanted....a real pain I can ensure you! Leave it up to the visitor and don't presume these things by leaving it to language sniffing.

[henry0]

Finally, don't use a "language choice" splash page - detect the user's preferred language from the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE value, and serve as appropriate

I was born FR, but am a US citizen living in the states
I like the concept of dual language since I live close by Canada; it can be a good idea for some clients.

Would you please develop that concept allowing a page to detect a tongue using the above HTTP...
I would like getting an understanding about it.
Thanks

Henry

[encyclo]

Leosghost, I'm absolutely not suggesting IP address sniffing, because of the problems you mention. The method I prefer is to detect the users preferred language, as set in their browser's options.

That means, if you prefer English, but are in Germany with a German-language browser, you set "en" as your first choice in the browser, and my script would serve English.

I don't have IE handy, but if Firefox 0.9.3 you go to Edit > Preferences > General > Languages. In my case, I have the selection "en-ca", "en", "fr-ca" and "fr". That means I should get English first then French if no English version is available, and tailored to my home market if the language options of the site are that specific.

Not all browsers send the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, so I pick a default appropriate for the site, which is served to those who don't send the header and the user can change afterwards. I only do the detection on the home page, not on the internal pages.

I also don't use the same URLs for both languages - I keep things in appropriate subdirectories so the content in both languages can be spidered (as opposed to content negotiation).

Oh and flags aren't good either - which language is represented by the Canadian flag? I've seen some Canadian sites using the Canadian flag for English and the Québec flag for French, which I find disconcerting at best.

henry0, I use a PHP script based on this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[henry0]

Encyclo
thank you, exactly responding to my query
Henry

[danieljean]

Using IP addresses is a monstrous hack, whereas using HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE is using the protocol *exactly as intended* and much, much better than a landing page- you (user) can set it once for every damned site, avoiding a lot of needless clicking.

IMNSHO, a good way to structure URLs is like so:

www.example.com/en/index
www.example.com/fr/index

in the background, url rewrites can be used to pass the "en" or "fr" as a paramer. (You'll need to set it once, check out the thread encyclo links to). Having a unique page also means that you can send a link to someone and be confident that they will see the same thing as you.

Also, check out some of the government of canada webpages once you get past the landing page. Every menu has a language option on the top left corner of the top nav menu- "french" on an english page and vice versa, so you can switch languages easily. Google news has the different versions in a footer, which may be easier for sites with many language options. Anyhow, this means your friend can switch languages if they don't like the page you sent them.

Not to mention that this is much cleaner for search engines :)