On Creating Multilingual Web Sites?

Jens asks: "I am designing an Intranet web application that needs to come out in multiple languages. I am using PHP to include common elements in include files, which makes things a lot easier. I want to avoid making each change three times (I have someone doing the translations, however). The question is: How do I tackle the multiple languages? Do I separate design from content, or content from design? Do I write "<table><tr><td>$text[$lang]</td></tr></table>", keep the international text in include files, and then call the pages with appropriate parameters; or should I write "<?php nice_table("Dies ist der deutsche Text"); ?>" and keep three different files, but one include file with all the design elements? How do I handle buttons (i.e. graphics) with text on them?" (Read More)

Multi-language sites are tricky, but as long as there is some separation of page design and language elements, it shouldn't be too hard for the rest to fall into place. What determines whether you separate design-from-content or content-from-design depends on the plans for your implementation. What schemes work for those webmasters out there with already established multi-lingual sites?

Comments

Seperation of both form AND content

[jd]

Actually, I'd remove -BOTH- the form AND the content from the page. Fetch the outer form from one database (that saves you having multiple copies of templates, for each page), have content-specific HTML in a second database and fetch the content from a third.

My thoughts would be to have anything not explicitly related to the actual content stored seperately from content-arranging tags (such as tables, paragraphs, etc.). This lets you maximise reusability, and minimise effort.

ie:

Database 1 -> Outer Shell Template
Database 2 -> Content-Specific Formatting Template
Database 3 -> Actual Text, in 1+ records. This should contain NO tags, whatsoever. That's all done in #2.

gettext

[rm -rf /etc/*]

PHP4 can be built with gettext support. gettext is a GNU library for internationalizing programs. PHP's support is undocumented currently, so you'd have to check out the code to see what it does (in ext/gettext), but it might be worth looking into.

Gettext info and manuals can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

xml style approach?

[zzzeek]

I havent used PHP before, but heres the basic idea not specific to any programming language..

build your site in English (or your default language), assuming we are talking about regular static HTML files or some kind of .shtml perhaps. Write a filter for your webserver (I use java servlets mapped to *.html myself) that parses the path info of the request for something like "/german/foo/bar.html", i.e. the language identified in the beginning of the URI. Then within your HTML files, anywhere you want translated text, do it like this:

<translation default="english" modulename="/foo/bar/mytext.html">
This is my english text.
</translation>

Then within your filter servlet or apachemod or whatever, parse the file for these tags (caching schemes can be utilized for speed), and then based on the language encoded in the URL, dynamically replace the body text (if the URI-specified language is not the default) with the contents of a file <languagebase>/foo/bar/mytext.html. So you could have somehting like /web/translations/german/foo/bar/mytext.html, /web/translations/spanish/foo/bar/mytext.html, etc. If a translation file is not present then you just use the default text already in the document, so you can still launch new HTML pages even if a translation is not available yet.

If you want to raise the bar of speed, dont use a dynamic filter, just write a perl script to regenerate an entire static site underneath "/german" "/spanish", etc. using the same scheme. Or you could even mix up the two approaches.

If your site is not static HTML but some kind of database driven thing, you can still use a similar approach, it just means the filtering program has to be molded to fit your content-delivery environment.