Coding a website with multilingual options

Multilingual websites

[whoosh]

Hi

I will try to keep this short. I have some experience of html and very basic php. I have designed our own e-commerce shopping site and now wish to add some french(to start with) language pages.

Is there a neater way to do this than replicating the whole site with the french languiage pages in so that users can swithch between them.

The other problem have is would search engines then view this as a mirror site because there would be some identical pages just with differeent urls?

Many thanks for your help.

mark

[BlobFisk]

Hi whoosh,

Regarding multilingual sites, check out this thread [webmasterworld.com] which is constantly active on this very topic!

I don't think (caveat: not sure!) that the search engines translate pages to compare the content of two different languages! So you should be safe here.

HTH

[bull]

Current at least Google does not see different language versions as duplicate content. I have a project in 3 languages, files are named foo-d.htm, foo-e.htm, foo-i.htm for german, english italian. On each page, there is a link "This page in german" and "This page in italian". All of them are doing very fine.

[whoosh]

Thanks very much for the replies above.

The thing is I intend not to translate all my pages at first. So if I was to replicate my site say into a FRENCH folder. Maybe only 30 of the 130 pages would be french translated pages. The other 100 would be exactly the same content pages as in my ENGLISH folder site. My worry with doing this is that google would pick this up as a 'mirror site' because there would be duplicated content.

I will perhaps try to look at another method.

Cheers

Whoosh

[bull]

The other 100 would be exactly the same content pages as in my ENGLISH folder site

I would not do this for the reasons you described. You should go for a full translation and put it online at once.