Can someone guide about using a different language other than english for my web pages. I would like the user to be able to select their language and have the pages render in that particular language.
I don't quite know all the details on what I need to do and what, if anything the users would have installed other than the language set itself.
I know that I have to use meta-equiv and pick the character set.
I understood that by doing so, it would render my html automatically to that language if I that particular character set installed on my computer.
So far, I haven't gotten it to work and I think I just don't quite understand all that I am to do in order for it to work.
any help/guidance would be apperciated.
thank you:-)

The meta charset just sets the character encoding (that's which numbers represent which characters), it sounds like you expect it to translate the text - it doesn't.

You have to translate the pages into all languages you expect to support, then provide some sort of structure to enable users to navigate pages in their required language, for example:
- replicate your site under different directories, where each directory represents a language,
- or build all the pages dynamically from a database which stores all the text keyed by language.

You may need to change the charset for some languages too, it just depends which ones you intend to support.

hth
Phil

thank you, I thought I was full of baloney about it automagically translating them.
Now, I have another question concerning this.
The user would be entering their name and other information in their language. I would want to store it in the db as english, but be able to display it back to them in their chosen language.
How do you suggest I do this ?
Also, I know I would need to display error message to them in their language, but my underlying code (server side) could remain them same
as to inserting a record or recording a value. Correct?
Except for contact information, I use values from listboxes and store the value in a db (MS Sql Server) so basically that would not change, only the text value I display in the listbox.
It sounds as if I need to have a seperate db in the language?
How do I set my computer to use a different language, I think I have to only set up the keyboard charset?
thanks for helping me :-)

Maybe its just a terminology problem, but you need to be clear in your mind about the difference between languages and character encodings.
For example:
When you say you want to store it in the db as english, do you mean your db uses english character encoding (like windows-1252 or iso-8859-1), or do you mean you want to translate the text (e.g. from hola to hello)?

Which languages are you intending to support?

sorry it has taken me so long to reply - got swamped.
well, I guess what I am saying is that I want to be able to dispaly the pages in their language such as french, german etc. But there will be english reading people who will view the data entered as well as those in their language. For example, I may be only to understand french, so i would want the dat to be displayed in french. But maybe my sponsor can only understand english, so I would wnat the french data to display to them in english?
Does that help to explain ??
and again, thanks for your help.:-)

If users are entering data in their own language and you want to be able to display that data in other languages you cannot get away from the issue that someone is going to have to physically translate that data and enter it into the database under the different language codes.

Its the same with all of the content of your web pages. You can set up a structure to support different languages, but the only way it will appear in other languages is if someone physically translates it. I don't know of any software that can reliably translate text.

There is a web site:
http://www.freetranslation.com/
which has a translation demo. This might clarify the difference between the language and the character set.


Sandra MacGregor

thank you for answering. That is a really interesting site.
gives me some real good ideas and a better handle on all this.
Is a tad bit confusing at first. So easy to have misconceptions.
thanks again:D