Does anyone know a good place to start if I wanted to convert my website into other languages?

Such as French - Espanol - Russian etc?

Thanks :D

Hi Kirk,

I used to work for a company that did this professionally - they're based here in Sheffield and are called SDL. They used to have a few 'white papers' on their site.

http://www.sdl.com/

There are a load of issues to consider depending upon how 'deep' you want to go.

If it's a one off translation then it's not too bad but if your site is dynamic you have the issue of maintaining databases and such with multiple language content. There's also stuff like formatting of numbers, use of colours that may be inappropriate in some cultures, colloquial writing, etc.

Try doing a web search on software localisation - this is the art of taking sofwatre or other media and 'versioning' in to other languages and cultures.

There are also techie issues such as unicode, screen real estate requirements changing because of the changes in word length in different languages, changing images that have text in them, etc.

Hope this helps!

Joe

That has helped a lot Joe thank you.

I didn't realise there was so much to think about with this.
I'll have to do some research into the languages I want to convert to and have a rethink.

Cheers for the advice :D

Yeah, all languages are loaded with idioms which don't translate. And often a badly spelled word will muck up a computer generated translation.

There's nowt funnier than a literal translation of something like "To go where the king goes", we have our own idiom to match which is "to go and spend a penny"

When you speak another language, it is better to write a letter/advert/notice in that language, rather than translate, as it makes much more sense to the native speakers rather than translating.