Multilingual sites - any best practices in 2017?
richpepp
Registered Users Posts: 360 Major grins
Haven't been on here for a while but trying to get our site back under control. What we are looking at is the best ways of making our site multilingual but there doesn't seem to be any ideal way of doing it. One option is to create top level En/Da/De folders and then put folders and galleries under that but then there is now way to 'flow down' any menus or site wide features
The best way seemed to be to organise based on language folders (EN/DA/DE) and then use CSS to hide the parts of the site wide structure not needed at any point but that would need to be based on URL so it gets very messy 
Has anyone found any nice ways of building a multilinguage site? The alternative is to use multiple sites, one per language, but we would clearly prefer to avoid that if possible
I've had a good hunt through here and elsewhere on the web but haven't found anything recent on this topic so wondered if there was anything new
Thanks again all
Richard
Comments
I'd be interested in a good solution for this question as well
I've wrestled with this problem as well, but could not come up with a reasonable solution. Hate to say it, but I think unless the hosting service is designed with multi-lingual support built in, it's going to be a royal pain. Not impossible, I suppose, but for me it was more trouble than it was worth.
Would adding a Google Translate element (from the Services section of content elements) to your home page work for you?
I've seen several SmugMug sites with Google Translate - probably on entire site - and it does carry over to each page on the site. There is a short lag when the page comes up in it's native language but it then changes to a translated page.
Here's a site with Google Translate on it - http://www.andywillia.ms/.
I can't remember the others off the top of my head but I know that I've seen more.
Here's the announcement of the service - https://news.smugmug.com/dont-get-lost-in-translation-introducing-smugmug-s-google-translate-widget-7ab2cdcc32e8.
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Thanks for that folks
@denisegoldberg - I looked at the translate thing but it's not really what we need although it's interesting.
@Richard - I think I have to agree. With some standard elements like language already built into the DOM then then CSS gets much easier but as it is everything is a fudge. Just trying to find the easiest version of that fudge at the moment
I have had a look at google translate as well - but to be honest the translations offered are rather horrible...to give you an example High Dynamic Range photos will be translated to "photos with high dynamic" my photos don't dance and jump around...some other texts are even worse. So if you would need to know the original language of the text well enough to anticipate what the translation is telling you...if you already are that good in English, you don't need the translation in general (you can just look up a word or two and even that might be unnecessary). But if you are not that sufficient you won't understand the translation very well...
Anyone who is actually fluent in more than one language realizes that machine translation leaves a lot to be desired. If you need to know where to find the bathroom, it will get you there, but if you want a professional looking web site, machine translation doesn't usually work.
That makes sense.
From what you and Lille Ulven are saying it sounds like machine translation might be worse than having the site in only one language, bummer.
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
@denisegoldberg, yes, unfortunately, that is the current status of machine translations. Unless, of course, you want to believe that I would bring to bicycles for my travels and am just "staying on the road" (as opposed to stopping). It's hard to translate those errors back into English...but parts of my About text make no sense at all when I use google translate to translate them to German. If I am using the translation into Norwegian I would not "aim my lens at something" but "aim toward my lens" and links would be opening in new categories...
So unless you need an example of how to create a non-professional looking page in other countries than your own, stay away from machine translations. It hasn't reached the level necessary yet to be used without further fixes made by humans.
In WordPress there are pretty good plugins available for doing multi-language sites but I can't see any painless way to make SmugMug multilingual. This would be perhaps a reason to use a WordPress framework for the pages containing text and incorporating the SmugMug pages/links as needed. Also a very time-consuming design process but perhaps cleaner in the end?
Our site is Drupal and multilingual so that wouldn't be too bad an idea and we will do that for some stuff. The idea really though was to give a nice experience to traffic that landed directly on our SmugMug site. Previous experience has shown that we get good amounts of new traffic that way.
It does sound like there isn't a straightforward solution at the moment. I'm very up for more complex solutions (jQuery, CSS etc) but I can't think of a good structure for doing it yet. I'll keep hunting