alicemccarthy Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Hi PW community, My name is Alice and this is my first ever post! I'm currently in the developing stage of my online portfolio site and wish to get some advice on how to approach adding multilingual functionality to my site. At the moment, my tree structure is as follows: / ├── About Us ├── Portfolio ├── Pricing ├── Contact Us └── Blog My idea is to have my site in both English and Spanish. With the exception of the blog section, every page will be translated into Spanish. As for the blog part, I'm thinking of running two pretty independent blogs, one in English and one in Spanish. Some posts/articles will be translated from English to Spanish, or vice versa, but, for the most part, content will be unique to each language. And here lies my dilemma:On the one hand, the "translated" part of my site will benefit from having multi-language fields, however, on the other hand, the blog section requires a multi-page tree approach (I think). So, what should I do?I think I could just go ahead and do something like this: / ├── en │ ├── About Us │ ├── Portfolio │ ├── Pricing │ ├── Contact Us │ └── Blog ├── es │ ├── Acerca de Nosotros │ ├── Portfolio │ ├── Precios │ ├── Contacta con Nosotros │ └── Blog But if I go down this route, will current page language switching be possible? I don't know. but that is something I'd like to have for the "translated" part of my site.So, I'd love to hear your ideas and suggestions.Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kongondo Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Hi Alice, Welcome to PW and the forums! Not a direct answer to your question but can you please confirm you have had a read here? http://processwire.com/api/multi-language-support/ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Alice, not all the pages have to be multilingual. You can perfectly make almost all the website with multilanguage fields and multilanguage URLS and have two different pages for the blogs. On a less technical tone. Have you considered having only one page for the blog with all the posts (EN, ES and both), giving the user the possibility to filter by only one language if that's all they know, but giving the possibility to those that understand both languages to have access to all the content. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alicemccarthy Posted January 29, 2014 Author Share Posted January 29, 2014 Hi guys, Hi Alice, Welcome to PW and the forums! Not a direct answer to your question but can you please confirm you have had a read here? http://processwire.com/api/multi-language-support/ Yes, I've had a look at that section of the API although, admittedly, I haven't gone through it thoroughly. Alice, not all the pages have to be multilingual. You can perfectly make almost all the website with multilanguage fields and multilanguage URLS and have two different pages for the blogs. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neildaemond Posted January 29, 2014 Share Posted January 29, 2014 sorry to highjack the thread but WOW, multi-language urls have come a long ways since I've last implemented the hacked urlsegment detection version we used to have... do links in the content switch to the appropriate language url automatically? Alice, I think that diogo was saying how instead of creating two branches of pages, you could use multi-language fields and urls in your pages to give them multi-language capability. This will result in much less overhead of creating duplicate pages... but, slightly less flexible if you wish to have different content based on the language (which doesn't seem to be te case). If all your pages are going to be translated, I recomend using multi-language fields and urls. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adones Posted January 30, 2014 Share Posted January 30, 2014 Hi guys! On YouTube, members comment in any language. Strangely, Google doesn't have a one-click button on each comment that enables the reader to easily translate the comment into the reader's browser language. Therefore if the user doesn't understand the language, the comment is not read at all. Most users don't copy each comment that is written in a strange language and paste it on translate.google.com in order to be able to read and understand a comment. * Why didn't Google embed such a translate button on each comment that is posted below a video? On forums like this one here, the admin doesn't want/allow its members postings and threads in other languages. * Why doesn't the admin (e.g. Ryan) just embed a translate plug-in so that the website and the forum including each posting and each thread can be translated into the user's browser language with just one click if the user doesn't understand the language in which the content is written? Bitcointalk.org is one forum, but it is divided into several languages. This is a good solution. But most users don't visit the subforums of other languages even if they speak that other language, too. Therefore I think that offering subforums in different languages should be completed with a translate plug-in so that in each posting there is a translate button and the translation engine automatically detects the language in which the posting is written and also detects the users browser language. So with just one click, the user can easily get the posting translated into his own language. * Why do you think do forum admins (like Ryan) reject having subforums in other languages with a translate plug-in installed in their forum engine? * If it is good for forum engines, then it should also be good for blog engines, or what are your arguments for differentiating between forum software and blog engine? * Does the SEO of websites and forums having content in different languages on the same page or thread get hurt and is the website and forum get punished by Google as far as the ranking is concerned? To my mind it is essential that the website's content is automatically displayed in the user's browser language as long as the website is offered in that language. And if it is not offered in the user's browser language, then the translate button should be displayed above each text field. I like Neil's and Diogo's recommendation as long as the users' participation (writing comments, not just reading) is desired by the admin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martijn Geerts Posted January 31, 2014 Share Posted January 31, 2014 I will answer only one question. For webdevelopment / programming there should be one language and one language only. From the past till now, it was mostly english, so now we should use english. The community here is formed around interests ( rather then geological environment ) so we need a tool to communicate. This tool is english. If the past was different, and all programming started in spain for the first years, this community was talking spanish probably. I consider using any other language then english bad practise. I don't like when people using German, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese or any other language then english in programming or writing their comments. That said, I'm Dutch i'm bad with languages even bad with the Dutch language. --- <qoute>To my mind it is essential that the website's content is automatically displayed in the user's browser language as long as the website is offered in that language.</qoute> This is one of the things I really disagree. My girlfriend is from Czech, she has a Czech version of her browser/windows. Google honours those 'language settings', so for me it's almost impossible to work with her computer and I don't know how to turn it of. Every question and click google respond in Czech, i'm totally lost with her computer. It's doesn't matter for google if I chose google.nl or google.com or google.de I think the only language 'switch' that can be made is through domain name, as domain name is choosable for the visitor. Why doesn't Google trust the user here? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 do links in the content switch to the appropriate language url automatically? Yes, links generated by $page->url type calls are updated automatically according to the language. * Why do you think do forum admins (like Ryan) reject having subforums in other languages with a translate plug-in installed in their forum engine? I'm not opposed to having other dedicated language boards here. But there would have to be adequate demand for such a thing. I'm not aware of there being sufficient demand for it at this point. So with just one click, the user can easily get the posting translated into his own language. As good as Google translate is, it's not great. For instance, Google Translate taking a German page to English is barely intelligible. Not to mention, code examples rarely survives Google Translate. If we were ever to have any other language boards here in the future, I don't think we'd be wanting a translate button. Does the SEO of websites and forums having content in different languages on the same page or thread get hurt and is the website and forum get punished by Google as far as the ranking is concerned? Having the same page URL respond to a user's accept-language browser setting is frowned upon by google. For that matter, having the same page URL display different content based on the value of any header, geo location, referrer or user agent is frowned upon by google. To my mind it is essential that the website's content is automatically displayed in the user's browser language as long as the website is offered in that language. This is not considered a good practice. If building a multi-language website you'd want to use an obvious language switcher of some sort and be sure your multi-language content is separated by URL or hostname so as not to confuse the search engines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ceberlin Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 >> automatically displayed in the user's browser >This is not considered a good practice I test like this: 1. is there a url with the language in it, like "/de/"? (coming from a Google search result or because of my language switcher menu / or for search engines) if not, 2. is there a session with a valid language? (user decided already before) if not, 3. is there a cookie with a valid language? (user decided already earlier before) if not, 4. What is the language set in the browser? (yes, a bad practice, but clients sometimes demand that feature) if not - or not in the array of valid languages, 5. display a default language. (last resort fallback) So there is an automatic language switcher, but the user can change that any time, using my language switcher menu. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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