language for website

[ycpc55]

hi
i want to add French German etc..language to my site but don't have and idea what to do or where to start will this be a big job to do?any info would be great my site is php with html templates thanks

[Accurax]

Do you mean french and german translations of all of your pages?

[ycpc55]

hi thanks for the reply yes thanks

[Ryan Fait]

I see you're from Canada, so French makes sense. Why German? A lot of times you can rely on Google to translate pages for you. It's not perfect, but you don't have to install anything as it's all built-in to Google.

[ycpc55]

hi Ryan Fait i have a dating website and i want to make it so everyone can pick there own language I'm not going to just ad French and German but every language any idea on how i can do this?thanks

[Ryan Fait]

English is the internet's language. You'll either need to hire people, or you'll need to let people say everything they need to in their own language. There's no easy way to get a website in 100 languages.

[ukgeoff]

Also, I think there is nothing that knocks the credibility of a web site more than pages that are badly translated.

If you are thinking that a person might enter their profile, etc. in one language and someone else can read it in another, I think that's a non-starter.

[Perad]

Its not that hard... IF you only want to translate static text. I.E if you want all navigation, headers, menus, search features, about/contact pages.

If wish everything to be changed including what users put in then this won't work.

What i do is the following.

Each bit of text becomes a variable. I then have a languages folder which includes English and whatever other language my client specifies.

As i make the site i add all the language variables i need. I then pass it to someone to translate the text variables into another language. So in the end i have something like this.

[Languages]
---[English]
------lang.php
---[French]
------lang.php

Then when a user picks a language it simply changes the path of the lang.php to their language.

[ukgeoff]

It isn't that simple.

What you end up with is a literal word for word translation and not, necessarily, a gramatically correct one.

Remember the first manuals that came with Japanese equipment!!!

[Perad]

Originally Posted by ukgeoff

It isn't that simple.

What you end up with is a literal word for word translation and not, necessarily, a gramatically correct one.

Remember the first manuals that came with Japanese equipment!!!

Yes, i was not saying that you translate words by word, i mean sentances and paragraph's.

Also on this forum things like "Web Development" would also be translated. As i said this would suit static text, it wouldn't work with translating pages of dynamic text that users post.

[Ryan Fait]

That just makes it a pain everytime you want to update the site...

[masonbarge]

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I do have two hints:
1. You probably want to use a UTF charset, UTF-16 for the French/German
2. If you can get a native German/French speaker to edit the translations, it will help a lot with idiom, grammar, and even wrong words.