Options for serving site translations

templates, includes and languages..

[natty]

hi all,

we are putting up translations for our site shortly.
i am wondering if there are any other options apart from mirroring the whole site in the other languages..

i had thought about includes.. but i wasnt sure if includes can be logically included..
ie if lang=fr then include fr.html etc..
i know of course this can be done with asp or some other server side scripting language, but is HTML capable of using includes with logic?
i thought not, but someone says yes..
im not convinced :)
so i thoughti would ask here.
tia

nat

[dcrombie]

I think in Apache you can have, eg, index.html.fr and index.html.de and the page that is served depends on the browser setting. You could also use mod_rewrite to make it easier to manage a multi-language site. I'd check in the Apache forum.

[BlobFisk]

There are a couple of different options, but no quick win. The problem with mirroring sites in different languages is that when the content changes you need to change the mirror sites as well.

1 change X 3 mirrors = 3 times the work invovled

We use a translation dictionary system. In our content we use a flag that the servlets identify and translate via our dictionaries. It's a nice and effective system but take a lot to develop and you need to keep your dictionary up to date.

You could ask your users what language they want and via a cookie serve up the correct include in the relevant language. You still need to create the includes in the different languages.

HTH

[rhodopsin]

I am very interested in your

translation dictionary system

Is this anything over and above babelfish translation. I would be very interested in any tool that can give decent translations. Do you know how good your translations are?

[bill]

BlobFisk are you saying that you have a machine translating your content into other languages? That's pretty brave. I've looked at some pretty high end translation software packages and the results were still not something I would put online.

had thought about includes.. but i wasnt sure if includes can be logically included.

If you had some sort of content management system it might be possible to do includes across domains. I'm looking to do this with some different language sites, with each language on its own local TLD.

[BlobFisk]

Out translation system works on a browser based application - so there is very little in the way of long paragraphs of information. We translate menu items, field labels etc. The data is either populated by the application (from our cutomers network environment) or entered by users themselves - so our datastore information does not need to be translated.

We keep a dictionary of all our labels etc. (based on a taxonomy) and for internationalisation we get this dictionary translated.

HTH