Producing a website in chinese

[caravan]

Hi,
I've been working on a website which is in several different languages such as french, German, Italian etc but now a version is required in Chinese. Does anyone have any experience or advice on how I go about converting the site into Chinese? The bulk of the site runs from a database so I can export out the UK data and get it translated into Chinese but what do I do regarding text embedded into images? What font do I use? Also what HTML encoding setting do I need to use for the HTML text? I always thought Chinese was read top to bottom, if this is correct how do you handle this? or would it revert to left to right for the web?

[suroit]

Chinese was from top to bottom, it is from left to right nowadays. I think I can give you a hand for the translation work.

ziyi SU

[suroit]

My email: suziyi_at_gmail_dot_com

[Peopleunit]

Wow, that's some cookie you're munching on, porting an existing site to Chinese.

I can't really spew out a complete list of concerns, aside from getting the site set up to support the unicode character set. That and getting the text to display properly.

Last week I was making some comparisons on a few CMS (content management) systems, and one of the things that was brought to my attention is that only a few of them provided support for both unicode and alternate direction of text flow. Add in support for multiple currencies and and various other idiosyncrasies, and then trying to apply all that to an existing website... well, maybe you should take a look at some of the CMS systems already designed to handle it.

Your image text will require a whole new set of images if you want to do it right. A cheat would be to just add alternate image text in Chinese.

If you're doing more than a simple navigational translation of the site, and the site includes user input, I think it might be best to run it on a separate URL. I.e., chinese.your-domain.com - or a completely separate domain even.

Oh, one more thing... do you have plans to learn, or can you speak and read Chinese?

[nickoran]

I have set up websites in chinese and english together simply using another folder, wwww.website.com/cn/ - using Joomla! CMS it was last year and i cant remember the character encoding but as long as the database is set to the right one and you have the font it isnt that complicated. I used alt tags in english so that i could double check it untill the end, then made them chinese. the company i did it for simply provided the translations and said which part of the english site it was for. you can add chinese to windows very simply and then getting the text on images is no problem too.