Multilingual Sites

any suggested tools, etc.?

[dcheney]

Howdy,
I have a largish site that is currently only in English but which covers a number of countries (and continues to expand). The site itself is mostly just raw html pages statically built via a home-designed database system.
Are there any sites or tools (or better yet, example web sites) that can handle multiple languages well?
My site is complete non-commercial and _very_ low budget, so cost is a significant requirement for any tools.
One good thing about the site, about 90%+ of the data is non-language dependent (i.e. proper names).

Thanks,
David

[chris_f]

Have you tried using systrans or babel fish. People viewing you site in another language will have to put up with a banner but it is free and reasonably good.

[Ove]

Here is a good post about translating [webmasterworld.com]

/Ove

[heini]

Well babelfish etc are inacceptable tools for serious translation. Especially when there is no context that helps understanding the buggy translations you are likely to get totally obscure results.

If you don't believe me just try for yourself. Take any page in a language foreign to you and get it translated via such a tool.Next, ask yourself if you want your page look like that.

If you are only aiming at translating often recurring words, like titles, then you are probably better off looking up those words and implement them in your self-programmed database-system. I'm not a programmer, but I have the idea that should be possible.

If you however have a translation up and running, it would be very appealing to set up different domains and feed them from your system.

[dcheney]

Howdy,
Unfortunately Systran, Babelfish, etc. really won't work because the translatable content of the site is mostly technical titles, which from previous experience, the automated systems handle very badly.

[Eric_Jarvis]

do a groups.google for "free translation"...there have been a number of offers made on Usenet over the last few years

getting a professional translation is worth the money if you possibly can

I'm finishing off an article on how we went multilingual...if it gets published I'll let people here know

[DrDoc]

Well, I have previous experience from multilingual sites, since all my web sites have been in both Swedish and English.

You know what, the best thing is always if you can translate the text yourself. That way you will save money, and you can be sure to get the translation you want. However, if you're not fluent in the language you have a couple of options.

Either find someone who is fluent in both languages (one of them native speaking) and have him/her translate it for you. You might end up paying for the job, but it's well worth the money.

Second, if you have time, you can always ask your visitors for help. Especially if the text to be translated isn't too long or complicated, I don't think they would mind helping you out.

Also, consider using online dictionaries. There are tons of them out there.

By the way, didn't you say that most of the words are technical terms? Well, then it should be even easier to find a list that contains the words you're looking for, and their respective counterparts in the second language.

What kind of languages are we talking about? And 'technical' how?

[heini]

dcheney - I would be surprised if there weren't a special dictionary covering your topic - after all it's a pretty multilingual subject per se with a clearly defined nomenclatura...

Again: what about just adding the translated words/titles to your db and serve according to users language choice?

[dcheney]

heini -
Well, I've added structures in my databases specifically to handle internationalization. The problem with that is that at the moment (and for sometime to come) the site is static. In other words I execute a little (well, ok, monsterously large!) script - and it creates all the site or some sub portion that I specify. Then I copy the results manually to the server.
In my particular case that works very well because it is rare to have more than 5 pages change in a week. The vast majority of pages will only get updated once a year or less.
What I'm trying to avoid is simply duplicating the existing site completely with the language adjustments as needed (less than 10% of text). Although that works, it would make my 8000 page/70 meg site absolutely ridiculously large. (Ideally I hope to support French, Spanish, Portugese, and Latin plus the original English.)
(The site continues to grow in size for unrelated reasons as well, so raw size is becoming an important issue.)