Bilingual Website - Any hints or tips appreciated.

[deadhippo]

Hi,
I am about to create a bilingual website from scratch and I was wondering if anybody has any advice in the area. Usually I just burst on in and start making webpages and hope for the best but for this project I want to plan it carefully before I execute to reduce the amount of times I have to restart it.

Any advice would be appreciated .. even a link to a good guide that you know about.

Thanks,
Alan

[Webnauts]

You might like to read about this here: http://www.indiawebdevelopers.com/te...ge_support.asp

[A. Smith]

Being bilingual myself, I can tell you, from a customer point of view, that no matter how fancy the programming, grammatical errors, typos, obvious literal translations, send me to another site pronto.

Just thought I'd mention that. So many sites would be great if they'd just take the time to hire a native to translate their site. And I'm talking about large Cos. that have the budget for it!!!

Also, beyond language itself, be aware of possible cultural differences. Some things in one country are routine, and are shocking in another country (even true with those countries that supposedly share a common language like the US and the UK :)).

[deadhippo]

@Webnauts - Thanks for that, I havent had the time to check but I will. I appreciate you finding that.

@A. Smith - I appreciate your concern but I am totally bilingual and understand two ultures perfectly so I'm sure I won't make any mistakes. ...Just joking. I really understand what you are saying though and no need to be concerned I have a native speaker partner for the other language and the culture we will be dealing with is my own so I'm sure we'll do fine.

I have seen some sites as you described and I went a runnin. Well, and English language site about Japan created by Japanese people and translated by software (lol).

[francoisA]

Hi deadhippo

I can post a few tips but I need a bit of information first:
-Will the pages be in HTML or Flash
-What type of website is it? If html is being used, are the pages all static or dynamic (php/asp/database)
-What type of website is it? Blog? eCommerce? Portfolio? Directory? etc...
-How many people will be working on the project and what kind of resources do you have access to?
-What is your budget?
-What are the languages?

Usually website translations are call localisation so you might find some guides by doing some searches with that keyword. There are also some companies that specialise in this, and if your budget is a bit lower, there are freelancers.

Cheers!

Francois Asselin
Webmaster
Share Results
t.514 849 8595
f.514 967 8321

francois@shareresults.com
www.ShareResults.com
Blog: blog.shareresults.com
2020 University, Suite 2250
Montreal, Canada
H3A 2A5

[deadhippo]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. The website will be a country guide made completely in html and apart from a newsfeed or something similar it will be static. In other words, no forum or blog. My budget is practically zero as I don't see that I need to spend anything. There will be two people working on the project, one Japanese and one Irish (me). And I will also get input from another Irish person. So you can guess the languages and I won't be needing a translator as we are both bilingual and together we can avoid cultural blunders.

Thanks

[francoisA]

Hi deadhippo

Since all the pages will be in html and are static they can be coded manually. The only thing that has to be given special attention are the character sets that will be used. If you do not have it already, you might want to start by installing the japanese character set from the microsoft website. Next comes the issue of how the characters will be displayed by browsers in other areas of the world, especially Japan. For this you could look into a reference such as http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~aelias4/encodings.html . You'll have to make sure that the webpages have the correct encoding. The code to modify for this looks like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

which you can find at the top of each webpage usually right under the <title></title> and above the keywords, description metatags.

A search on Google will yield more details concerning this subject.

[deadhippo]

Thanks for the advice. I had forgotten about that character encoding thing.
I was also looking for some ideas on a general strategy for files arrangement. Should I have two folders. EG. /jp/ and /en/ and work like that? Or what is a good way to make it clear that the site is bilingual.

[francoisA]

Hi deadhippo

For static websites, yes. making two separate folders is recommended. You could add a link to the top of every page to switch languages. Clicking on this link could navigate to the same page except in a different language. You could achieve this with PHP/ASP code which looks for the current filename and then jumps to the same filename in the other language's folder.

For the folder names, write the whole language name for SEO purposes. Its subfolders should have appropriate names. A splash page could be use for the entrance with both language options or a default language could just be hard coded.


Cheers!

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by deadhippo

@Webnauts - Thanks for that, I havent had the time to check but I will. I appreciate you finding that.

I forgot to mention here that we are also implementing our site in German these days, and we are setting up the 3rd option mentioned in the link I posted above.