Forum Moderators: phranque
Also, is there anything specific that I need to do to the headers of the page to tell browsers that the page is a specific language? For example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
If I just change the bold parts to "ES" will the browser expect the page to be in Spanish? or is there more to it?
I am starting a new project where I am making an existing site multi-lingual and I am trying to decide which language to translate the site to first. The original site is in English, should I go with Spanish, French, Japanese? any suggestions?
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//[b]EN[/b]" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="[b]en[/b]" lang="[b]en[/b]">If I just change the bold parts to "ES" will the browser expect the page to be in Spanish? or is there more to it?
Nope, not exactly. You're just messing up the DTD there. That won't change the language of the page. It will invalidate your DTD declaration. Also you're adding XML namespaces to an HTML 4 document...be careful with that.
Since you're looking to do several language versions it might be helpful to use UTF-8 encoding. Here are some examples of how you might set the encoding for a Japanese language page:
HTML 4.01 Transitional
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="ja-JP">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="ja" />XHTML Transitional
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ja-JP" lang="ja-JP">
Well, I'd start by looking at the stats -- where do your visitors come from? If the country from which you get the most visitors is for example Germany, I'd start with German.
I would do the opposite. If most of your users come from Germany, I would translate it into anything but German, I would translate it into German last. If they are already coming why change it?
1+ Billion customers.
I would do the opposite. If most of your users come from Germany, I would translate it into anything but German, I would translate it into German last.
If they are already coming why change it?
My site is not completely text which will help and I am asking my visitors to let me know if I need to improve on any grammar.
Because my site is currently english only, most of my traffic is from the US, but I am trying to expand the reach of the site by offering different languages.
On the pages that I have translated (they are not live yet) AdSense has shown me some very well targeted ads, at least in my opinion. (I checked some of the destination sites to see what they were) Which tells me that the translation isn't completely messed up.
I'm sure the grammar will not be perfect, but that's something I can iron out over time. My main goal is to develop a new market for the site.
This is going to sound lame but I'm starting with babelfish for my translation.
Go to a non-English language competitor's site and run it through your favorite machine translation. Would you give your credit card number to someone who wrote gibberish like that on their site? You're wasting your time here.
The customers couldn't tell the difference and paid heavy money ...got gibberish that looked OK ..
One of them came to me because their kids penfriend mentioned their site was apparently on some strong chemical abuse rendering it incoherent ...
Another done by the same outfit but from French to English looked like the English you get in the worst of the Nigerian letters..
BTW ..SEOing in another language is also not for those who don't live in the target culture as language and culture change continually ( your kids don't speak the same way you do is one example ...so who is your target? )page design , SEO etc needs to be just as adaptable ...
You won't for example get a link from a site in France if your french looks weird or anglicised...Unless you are selling ringtones or talking about text messaging (BTW ... SMS is what it's called here )....which is the English acronym ( used by all french )and not what autotrans would have told you was the phrase if you put in "text messaging" ..."communication ecrit" wouldn't get you anywhere ..
I get to see some absolute pearls in French from here ..and some stuff in English from the USA ( from folks with "Anglo names" ) that makes me wonder if anyone over there was teaching English for the last 40 years!
1) German
2) Spanish (to cover Southern America and Southwest of USA)
3) Chinese
Based on internet saturation and economics, I would opt for:1) German
2) Spanish (to cover Southern America and Southwest of USA)
3) Chinese
Depending on what you are selling , how much , shipping and a whole slew of other stuff ..add Portugese , Arabic , Tamul , French , Italian .
Which ways around?
