[thelist] Multiple-language sites

[Katie Kearns]

Thanks to everyone who responded! I have all sorts of great things to think
about when planning this site. :)


At 09:46 PM 3/1/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>  other than the final result, there was one page for
>each action (a combination of vanilla HTML and Java widgets) which added
>up to roughly 400 pages per language (so ~1600 pages for just 3
>languages).  This amounted to 3 languages that are never, ever synched
>100% with each other and ECO's that take 3x as long to complete.  LOTS
>of Advil use.

Whoa! Thankfully, I don't think it's going to be *too* many pages. Firstly,
we don't have the money to translate that much stuff. ;) Also, a lot of it
is content already produced that we just sort of need to tie together and
help people navigate around.


>I certainly don't have the best way, or the only way, but keep these in
>mind:
>
>  - We never found a reliable way to detect peoples' browser languages.

Oh well! ;)


>  - Our language selector ran across the bottom of the page, and that
>seemed to work good enough.  Once the user was on their comfortable
>language, they usually bookmarked it and rarely veered back to their
>original language.

Good point!


>  - Be sure to index your site's different languages with that languages
>respective search engine - helps eliminate strays as well.
>  - _Don't_ use flags.  Quebecois speek French, France people speak
>French, Swiss people speak French Spanish, German, etc...

Yeah -- I figured they wouldn't like that so much. ;)


>  - I'm going to recommend Lionbridge for the translation services.  They
>rawkd for us.  Very supportive and they have extremely knowledgeable
>technical staff.

I think that's who we use, actually. :)


>Katie, I hope this helps a bit.  It's a bit daunting, but the end result
>can be pretty amazing.
>
>Chris.

That's what I'm hoping for! Thank you! :)  I'm stuck with my 11 languages
(and perhaps a few more even before the page is completed...) so it should
be very interesting...

-Katie