Creating a Multilingual Web site

There aren't any borders in cyberspace, so why limit your Web site to a domestic audience? One of the Internet's greatest potentials is its ability to reach people half-way around the world in a matter of moments. But this potential falters if those accessing your site can't read your Web pages. In this article, we'll look at some techniques and resources for translating your Web pages to different languages.

Choosing a language The first point you'll need to consider is what language or languages in which you want to make your Web site available. The most popular languages on the Internet, besides English, are German, Japanese, French, and Spanish. Of course the languages you choose depend largely on the information your Web site provides and how you present the site. For example, if you concentrate on local information in Florida or Southern California, Spanish is a logical translation choice.

Character encoding Another important consideration in language translation is character encoding. The Web was originally design with a character set that supported Western European languages. If you're fluent in the language you're translating to, you may be tempted to jump in and use the <FONT FACE> tag, but this element really isn't designed to properly support foreign language characters. The <FONT FACE> tag tells a browser to use a script font that is different from its default font, which can create problems for a user that doesn't have the character set you specified. The International Standards Organization has established an ISO 8859 standard series character set to address the problem of character encoding. The ISO 8859 standard series provides character sets for 20 of the most widely used languages on the Internet. You can find out more about character standards and encoding at the Babel Web site, which is dedicated to helping people set up multilingual sites. Babel is located at

babel.alis.com:8080/

Translation software If you want to provide translations of your Web pages for fun or general interests, your best bet is probably translation software. These programs provide quick, rough translations that can help you get a page running quickly and cheaply. The only drawback is that machine translation hasn't reached the point where translations are true--your pages will always have some grammar and out-of-context errors. You also need to remember that translation software can't translate text graphics. Still, translation software does provide good basic language translation. In addition, if you're thinking about doing your Web page translations yourself, these software packages can do the raw translation work for you, and then you can clean the grammar up afterwards. AltaVista provides free Web page translation from English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Just go to the AltaVista Translation page at

babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate

and enter the URL of the page you want to translate. Figure A shows an Inside the Internet article translated into Italian.

Figure A: AltaVista's translation page will translate your Web page into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish.
[ Figure A ]

We've listed some reliable translation software packages below.

Translation services If your company is interested in serious translations for Internet commerce or company promotion, you'll want to work with a good translation service. There are dozens of translation services that specialize in Web site translation. Many will also translate your HTML and provide marketing services. Following are two sources that include a wide spectrum of Web translation services. The Yahoo! Web site Translation page links to more than 30 translation services on the Web, and is located at

www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/
Communications_and_Media_Services/ Translation_Services/Website_Translation/

The Translation Services on the Web links to just about every translation site on the Web. This site is located at

www.hake.com/languages.html-ssi