Page 1 of 1

language translation

Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 11:16 am
by gurjit
hi all,

i just want some ideas on how i can go about this. i've got a website which has dynamic as well as static data on it. when a user logs into the system i want to translate all the text displayed on the website into the users preferred language. the text currently on the website and in mysql tables is in english.

any ideas on how i can do this. are their any resources out there to do this?

any help suggestions will be appreciated.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 11:30 am
by feyd
there are software packages you can install, and sites you can have automatically translate between several languages, however, none of those are 100% perfect. Most languages has small contextual differences that these packages often get wrong.

babelfish is one site that I know of.

The best solution I've seen is having the content translated by someone fluent in the two languages, which is expensive at best.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 11:47 am
by gurjit
i was looking at translating it myself. its a big job but at least the content would be correct. the problem of getting translators is not difficult for me.

what kind of table structure and coding practise might be useful. do you think using an object to load all the values into would be quicker than calling a query for each page and then pulling the translation?

Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 11:58 am
by feyd
having an order of choosing which language version to display.. like if the chinese version isn't available, default to english kinda thing..

you could, and probably should store all the versions inside the same table. How to organize that, I don't quite know, other than having a field designate what language is contained.

They route I was going to use for my client's site was almost having a seperate site for each language. Where all the language specific graphics and static lines are stored in they're own places, and the database tables contain a language designation, and pretty much only the language(s) the user wishes to see, are shown.

Since you'll be providing translations of the same text, it'd be a good idea to figure out some pageID or the like that can be the same between them, so you can find the siblings of a given entry.

I'd give users the power to choose the order of search in the languages as well. So if I can read chinese, spanish, and english, and I prefer that order, I have a way of specifying that as my search order such that if the chinese version doesn't exist of entry x, it'll look for a spanish version of entry x. And so on...