Re: Site Translation & Presentation

Hi Peter,
I've set up two fair sized bilingual sites that use English and Thai. In
your message you mention that they want a page in Japanese - my response
would be that if this is going to be a stagnant page that is not really a
translation of the entire site, but rather a cookbook of the site on one
page, then I don't think you need a "language select " style dialog - rather
just a button with "read about us in Japanese" or whatever. If however it is
going to be a complete translation that will update alongside the English
site (I'm assuming the other language is English) then I'd suggest setting
the default language to English but given them the option to switch and
after which the language flag is appended to all the querystrings and links
and passed around the site accordingly.

I'd recommend against doing a language check and then automatically serving
the page and this is why: To read Thai language on the web you need to have
Thai fonts set on your system and the web site needs to be using the correct
character encoding (at the moment for Thai windows-874 is the most popular).
My PC runs Thai windows and if you did a language check on my browser you
would detect Thai and serve Thai accordingly - the problem is - I can't read
Thai! I also know many Thais who prefer to read in English on the web.

Also, by doing language detection, you are assuming that the user is the one
who owns the machine - often not the case.

I'd recommend starting in English and allowing them to switch if needed.

One other suggestion - an education related site that I maintain here is in
Thai and English, default is English and in the top left corner there is a
big button that says "read this in Thai" or something l;ike that. The logs
show that over 50% of the users click on that button and surf throughout the
Thai language portion of the site and then leave - they do not return to the
English portion. The problem is it that the Thai portion is all stagnant old
information that has not been updated in over 18 months, but, as they are
not looking at the English site, they do not get all the latest information.

Anyway, hope the above is of help, let me know if you have any more
questions.

Cheers

Stuart

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Benoit <pbenoit(at)triton-network.com>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 7:08 PM
Subject: Site Translation & Presentation


> My main client is going international!
>
> And now they want a page in Japanese.  ug.
>
> OK, should be pretty easy to find a service to translate the pages.  My
> questions is :  What's the best way to present the information?  Should I
> offer some sort of select for different languages?  Should I do browser
> detection/language detection and redirect? (what if they want an English
> site?) Or should I do a subdomain?
>
> Has anyone done this before, and what experiences can you share with me?
>
> Thanks,
> Peter
>
>

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