designing a website with multilingual options?

[babybeans]

Hi

I have a problem - maybe small or big not sure.

I have designed an e-commerce shopping site mainly on dreamweaver but with some html editing and an integrated php shopcart.

I would like to try and add some multi-lingual options. But would not want to translate the whole 128 pages say into French. I would be looking to translate some of the important information and shopping pages and to allow for example french customers to purchase in Euros.

What I want to know is there a neater way to do this other than just repeat the whole site but with the french translation pages in it, then link to those pages when the customer chose say french. This would mean lots of mirror pages (same English language content but with a different url and would seem to be a bit encumberous. I was worried that search engines would see this as a 'mirror site'?

If i tranlate say 20 pages, then really only want to add 20 pages but need to be able to differentiate between the different langauge pages depending on what language has been chosen by the user.

Is there a neat way to do this. My uderstanding of html is probably OK ish!, I have a very basic idea of some PHP.

Any help gladly received. Many thanks

MArk

 

[Alexandru Ungur]

There are two standard methods that I know of:

1. the "apache" way: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html
is where you only translate the files and name them according to the rules you will find in the documentation I mentioned.
You can also let the users choose the language by using a little JavaScript: http://tech.irt.org/articles/js082/index.htm

and

2. the "PHP" way:
using gettext() function:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.gettext.php

Hope it helps.

 

[crowebird]

I once had this option at my site once, where you could choose your language and it would change the site on its own... I dont remember where I got it but if I find it I will hit you with a link.

 

[crowebird]

Didnt take me too long... here you go, add this code to some of your pages and it will work

<script language="JavaScript1.2" src="http://www.altavista.com/static/scripts/translate_engl.js"></script>

 

[babybeans]

Thanks

Thanks for the information everyone - lots to go on. I might try and use PHP as I know a little. Thanks to everyone.

Babybeans