Hi All,

I just got to work on a website that has a feature of switching between English and Swedish content for now. All there going to be database driven. Something like the entire content of the website is going to be in two copies as of now on english and swedish. Has anyone worked on such a project, so that one can list me all the concerns I should keep in mind, working on this. Any better way of doing this than keeping the content in two different copies which would be a problem in managing up-to-date content of both versions.

Some of which I thought of, was if the client PC doesn't have the swedish or other language fonts, how do I go about it managing that?

Any other inputs on things to keep in mind are most welcome and appreciated.

Thanks in advance for all your time.

Cheers!

-Vijay G

__________________
- Vijay G

Hey, i'm searching help like you in a miltilingual site, ¿are you solve this questions?

Regards y saludos

www.dualnet.net

I am working on it. Will let you know once I am done. Also I am yet to know from anyone here.

Cheers!

-Vijay G

Hi there,

Ollie Cornes wrote an interesting 3-part article about Internationalization on the DevX site. The article series deals with stuff like displaying different text for different languages, localizing dates and images, and so on. Part 1 can be found here:

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/6997

The left bar contains the links to part 2 and 3.

Using the right fonts may turn out to be tricky. There really isn't a cross-browser solution for downloading and displaying the right fonts. However, often people that want to read a site in Swedish, already have a swedish font installed. For those who don't you can offer a download of the appropriate fonts, or choose a proprietary third party product for fonts management.
Is there so many stuff in Swedish not available in standard fonts? I realize you use a lot of stuff like ä ö ø Õ, but they seem to be available in standard fonts....

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: Window Paine by Smashing Pumpkins (Track 9 from the album: Gish)

Imar,

Thanks for your reply. That was really an useful article. A lot of coincidence I could see with what I had in my mind. So I feel I am on the right path. As it was an ASP.NET related article, still I was able to take the things I wanted.

This how the site has got to work.

As of now it is going to deal only English and Swedish text.
Translation part would be done manually, and parallel release of content is for sure.
There should be an option on every page to go to the other version of text, which means all the pages are going to be dynamic and available in 2 versions(contents will be stored in SQL server)

It would be more helpful if I could get something related to this dealing with ASP (The client is specific on that - ASP, SQL server 2000, IIS 5). I also found an article from Microsoft related to this.

http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0100/i...t/internat.asp

But I am new to DTC mentioned in that. Will test that out and see how it helps.

Will update you all if I find something more on that.

Thanks for your time and effort.

Cheers,

-Vijay G

Hi Vijay ,

Right. Sorry I didn't see your question was about classic ASP, not ASP.NET. Then again, as you said, many principles are the same for both technologies.

If I were you, I would stay away from DTCs. I never really liked them in ASP / Interdev. They used to create an awful lot of code, and there behavior was, at least, awkward. I consider them as an "old technology" [if you look at the publication date of the article, you'll see why ;)]

If all you need to do is display an article in two languages, I would do the following:

1. Create a drop-down with the available languages
2. When the user selects a new language, reload the page, and save the selected language in a cookie or session variable (a cookie makes more sense, as you can save the user's "preferred language" between browser visits.
3. Use the value from the language cookie to select the correct article from the database. If the cookie does not exist, use a default value you make up (it probably depends on the site whether this is English or not)

How you store the articles depends a bit on your site. One solution is to create a composite key, consisting of an article ID and a language code. e.g. you have a column called ID and a column called language. If you need to select article 251, you can also query for the correct language.
You can also save the articles using an autonumber / identity column, and then use a second table to link the articles to their languages.

Of course there's a lot more to it then I just described here, but this may get you in the right direction.

If you have other questions related to the subject of internationalization, feel free to ask.

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: Day for Night by Moloko (Track 3 from the album: Do You Like My Tight Sweater?)