Multilingual Websites - Best Strategy?

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

Starting a web development project that involves having the site in different languages.

At the moment I'm trying to work out how to best implement the system to handle the different languages. Having static language files is the easiest option in my opinion but it screams to me that if something needs changed I have to edit all the different language files.

Is dynamic translation feasible on a one man project? Can you buy in software that will allow me to have an English master site which can then be translated as and when a user changes the language on the site?

Would be really interested to hear how people have done it in the past

[directhex]

machine translation will always look terrible

use standard codes for everything and a bit of browser sniffing (so you have www.mysite.com/FR/images/logo.png and www.mysite.com/en_GB/images/logo.png, with the PHP/ASP/whatever for the site filling in the language code as needed). abstract as much as possible - as long as you use CSS properly, then each page in each language should only need a little tinkering

[sp3n]

recently completed a fairly complex multi language flash site.
5 languages - English, Italian, Russian, Chinese (simplified) and Japanese.

we did it with the combination of a mysql database having table/field names ending with ENG/RUS etc for product information/details, and static resource bundles for page labels/titles/links etc.

worked really well !

[TheAnimus]

There are some good examples for this in asp.Net (remeber, this is a platform, not a language) on msdn.

The great thing about doing it this way, is its rather easy too manetain assuming you have Visual Studio (even the free express edition can do this i belive)

[IBM]

Rogue .... don't worry, I know what you're saying. The answer is no, there's no realtime translation system which will produce well written language translations. Yet. It's only a matter of time, but if you need it now, you're going to have to get it changed and translated everytime you edit the original text. I don't know who you're using, but I can recommend www.corporatetranslation.co.uk (they're cheap but very good)...I think their website is under construction, but if you want the contact number I can get it for you.

[Spud1]

In my opinion, the best way of doing this is with ASP.NET resource files.

Doing things this way, you create one version of each page, but rather than setting the language specific properties of your controls (text or writing direction for example) in your code or the property window, you set them in 'resource files', and create one per language. Eg contact.aspx would have contactEn-GB.resx and contactDe-DE.resx for english and german. Then you add some relavent code in the top of the page file to use resources and your away. This can all be done using Visual Studio's resource designer/editor which makes things nice and easy

As for choosing the language to display..well my preferred way is to use browser language settings to pick it up (easiy in .NET), but to also offer a drop down list or series of links to change the language if desired (preferably also set in an account) .

Getting the pages translated is best done with a service like ibm suggests; you just write the english text and then email it to them, before copying it back into your resource files.

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

Cheers for the advice so far guys, proving helpful!

[stytagm]

We do exactly what Spud1 described, all the text on the site is in .Net Resx files, (which are just XML at the end of the day) and it's sucked in according to settings.

We then do the same for images. Graphics with no text are in /images but anything with text in it would be in subfolders something like /images/en-GB

Alt texts can be a problem, but you can use more strings from your resources files.

What languages / platforms are you using?

[awm]

I know Apache has multilanguage support built in (it finds the right language for you). The default pages (at least on Mac OS X Server) are multlingual and are named index.html.fr, index.html.it (or something like that). Just another thing to look into.

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

I was hoping to do it using PHP / MYSQL but I have been meaning to look into .net for a while now so this could very well give the excuse to do it. Having said that I don't really want to waste the clients time while I disappear off to learn C# and .net!