[thelist] Foreign Translations

[Mike]

At 16:13 30.11.2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Is it an okay plan to take an existing English website programmed in 
>ColdFusion and basically duplicate it across a few other languages 
>(French, German, Italian, Spanish) either in their own directories like 
>/english and /espanol, or at localized domains like .com, .com.es, etc... ?
>
>What workflow issues have people run into going with this method - or does 
>anyone have successful workflows implemented. Do you use the ip-to-country 
>database to do the auto redirects to localized URLs? Is there a better 
>method of doing all of this?

Hi Ketan

The biggest workflow issue IME is when you change something
at the website, you have to repeat this in each language folder.
Tedious and error-prone.

If you can, put the different languages into a database and fill
unique templates with them... You can sniff the user's system
language via the environment variables and, in addition, let
her switch the language manually. This sets a variable which you
can append to the URLs or store in a session array.

>Also I noticed previously that someone mentioned it was important to save 
>word files in Unicode format at the translation end. Why is this important 
>if I can open any word file on my end and save it as Unicode - besides 
>we'd just be copying and pasting text anyway, or am I missing some large 
>concept?

One problem is that Word's auto-correction throws all kinds of
weird special chars into your text.

Mike

_____  mike s. krischker  http://webdesign-schweiz.ch/
        webpro mailing list  http://webdesign-list.com/
        flashpro mailing list  http://flash-list.com/