Multilingual Websites - Worth the hassle?

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mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Have any of you got any experience of maintaining multi-lingual websites?

Are they worth the effort?
 

Amateur

New Member
Developing a one to display irish and english versions from the one db on the moment and its a pain in the arse!
 

Redfly

New Member
On our previous site, we had an Irish version. It was a pain in the arse all right and we got rid of it because we had absolutely 0 visitors using it.
 

grandad

Member
Did one - folamh.ie [English/Irish]

It was a pain. He kept sending me content, and I had to keep reminding him to send the translation.

Unfortunately, I don't have stats on the number who view the Irish version as it's cookie based. I wouldn't say there are many!
 

dave

New Member
We are developing a multi lingual site at the moment, 6 languages so far. Translation and getting them done is an issue.

On a side note. Joomlas' JoomFish is a very nice way of maintaining multilingual sites.
 

uncleseanie

New Member
I came across a piece of software that would do translations on the
fly i.e. if you had an english website you could click a button and
it would translate the site to, say, spanish. Not sure about its accuracy
as I don't speak any foreign languages but it seemed pretty neat.
Can't remember where I got it from. I'll have a hunt around and try
and locate it and will repost. Also don't think Irish was an option.
 

Redfly

New Member
I came across a piece of software that would do translations on the
fly i.e. if you had an english website you could click a button and
it would translate the site to, say, spanish. Not sure about its accuracy
as I don't speak any foreign languages but it seemed pretty neat.
Can't remember where I got it from. I'll have a hunt around and try
and locate it and will repost. Also don't think Irish was an option.


I assure you, every single one of these tools will do a sub-par job at translating and end up making you look stupid and unprofessional.

If you're going to get a translation done, get it done properly. That's even if your site warrants it. I'm really lucky, my team, between us, we speak 8 languages.

A good place to get translations is universities. We have hired students from Trinity to do freelance translation work in the past at very reasonable rates.
 

grandad

Member
I came across a piece of software that would do translations on the
fly i.e. if you had an english website you could click a button and
it would translate the site to, say, spanish. Not sure about its accuracy
as I don't speak any foreign languages but it seemed pretty neat.
Can't remember where I got it from. I'll have a hunt around and try
and locate it and will repost. Also don't think Irish was an option.

This it? - Website Translation Service
 

enzo

New Member
Have any of you got any experience of maintaining multi-lingual websites?

Are they worth the effort?

I did a Finnish/English site for a friend. Found little difference between that and a monolingual site really. But it was only a very small number of pages, plus he took care of the content (not finished yet actually) :rolleyes:
 
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