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Steps for Multilingual website?

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  • 05-04-2013 9:18am
    #1
    Humblepie
    Registered Users Posts: 94 ✭✭


    Hi Folks,

    Basically, we supply globally in a niche market and 90% of business is via website. Our site is English Only but I want to set up two different languages. We recently had a CMS set up with a view to optimising SEO. The site is hosted on our web developers servers. Can anyone advise what steps I need to go through to have two other languages (russian and spanish for now) included on our website (language flags on our .ie website). I have been told having a .ru and .es domain extensions are better in the long term.
    At this stage, all i know is who will do the translations. Any info on steps to take, cost estimates, annual costs, pitfalls for this project is appreciated.

    Thanks so much , H


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    #2
    ressem
    Registered Users Posts: 2,426 ✭✭✭ressem


    You'll hate this but it depends on your website. How graphic heavy it is, what 3rd party components you need, how often it is updated, what CMS you use and how professional the completed item needs to be.

    So I'll outline an example small scale site and you can see if any of it applies to you.

    1. Installed Wordpress CMS.
    2. Installed Wordpress WPML ($70) to keep track of localisation.
    (it's listing page lists the status of each of the webpages: translated, untranslated, need to be updated for each selected language.)
    3. Create the content in English.
    4. Use WPML to generate XLIFF files for each page's content. These are XML files that list the items on the page in a standard localisation format. It includes image paths and alt text. Suitable for loading into professional translators software.
    http://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/using-desktop-cat-tools/

    5. Use WPML to attempt to grab theme, menu and plugin strings. Your theme may require modification, wrapping text in php gettext() calls to display the appropriate language's text. The WPML software exports these as .po and .mo files, which can be sent for translation.

    Starting translation costs from http://www.icanlocalize.com/site/ start at US$0.09 per word per language, charged per-page.

    Each page can be quickly emailed to a configured translator when it needs updating through the software.

    Cost of fine tuning SEO keywords, pagetitles, wording and graphics for a target market and proofreading depends on what resources you have available to you.


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    #3
    Fanny Cradock
    Registered Users Posts: 10,245 ✭✭✭✭Fanny Cradock


    What CMS do you use?


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    #4
    Humblepie
    Registered Users Posts: 94 ✭✭Humblepie


    Ok, site is not graphic heavy. It is functional, no E Comm functionality, pics and basic text and plays a couple of movies - thats all.
    The site is old and was developed by our web developer in 2007 . The CMS was developed only recently by the same developer (dont know what it is developed in) to aid with SEO. Basically, we were given a username and password to login. Works fine.
    So, I am looking to understand the steps I need to take to have the site translated to Russian - either as a language flag on our .ie site OR get a .ru domain .
    Would the easiest way be to set up a .ru site completely separate? If so, could someone advise the steps I need to go through here. Please note : i want to move away from our current developer completely so want no input from him.

    Thanks


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    #5
    Fanny Cradock
    Registered Users Posts: 10,245 ✭✭✭✭Fanny Cradock


    I don't think people can be of much help without knowing the specifics. The "easiest way" is relative to your CMS and its capabilities (or lack of).

    For example, MODX, which is a fairly common CMS, features support for things called contexts. If you had a .ie context - complete with pictures, text and whatever else - then you would, amongst other things, create a new .ru context and populate this with your Russian content. You are essentially creating two sites within the same MODX installation.

    As already mentioned, Wordpress has various multi-language plugins that might do the job.

    And so on...

    It might be simply impracticable to use your current CMS, it might not. Who knows?


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    #6
    ressem
    Registered Users Posts: 2,426 ✭✭✭ressem


    If the CMS is not listed when you log in to make changes, then you could try
    1) enter the website address into guess.scritch.org
    2) a browser extension like chrome sniffer for the chrome browser

    common ones would be
    wordpress
    joomla
    drupal
    modx

    though there are plenty of others.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_frameworks


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