Foreign web sites - Design

[oshta]

Ok i've done a bit of webdesign, and i was wondering how possable is it to write a simple multi lingual web site ???

- without and understanding for the language!!


just a thought
daniel

[Angus]

There used to be a thing called babelfish. I think lycos linked to it.

I don't know if you could pass it text in one language and get it back in another.

I know that google offers translations to english, but I don't know for the other way around.

Hope this helps

[killgORE]

Woah.... This is a big ask. Babelfish is pretty good for small paragraphs.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr

But try passing it a whole page... This it is not so good at. I got a French friend of mine to read back a page of text that came back from it. Between my piss French and his English we worked out that this is not great.

[Rythmic]

I work on a website that currently supports 23 languages (+4 variants due to country, e.g Mexican Spanish) and I only speak one (well and some very broken German ). If you're just doing western european then it's no trouble whatsoever - just make sure you've got the

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

line in the header of your page.

If you're doing other languages (polish, russian, czech, chinese, etc. Then you've got a choice, unicode or code pages. Unicode uses multiple bytes to store a character, and supports every single character you'll ever need. Code pages swap around which character a byte will represent.

The only reason to go with codepages is too support old browsers such as Nutscrape 4 - and it's a right pain in the arse. Go with Unicode unless you have good reason to support that useless thing. (We don't want to alienate the small percentage left - about 2.8% of our visitors)

[edit]
BTW unicode header is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
[/edit]


Oh - and I'd never ever want to use babelfish to translate webpages - just check out a french page in it (convert to english) and think - is that what I want my visitors to see?