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alain
09-13-2008, 06:08 AM
Hi,
I would like to know the real purpose to split website according to languages.
for example if a website includes english, german and french, 90% of website do the following thing:
www.mywebsite.com/en/ (for english)
www.mywebsite.com/de/ (for german)
www.mywebsite.com/fr/ (for french)
why do they not use dynamic language selection in order to have only 1 web site like www.mywebsite.com ?
languages could be stored into js file or php file for example.
A.
Probably because it's easier to edit files in separate folders.
alain
09-13-2008, 08:38 AM
But it means to edit each files to maintain the same level or design of website.
isn't is crazy ?
svidgen
09-13-2008, 11:25 AM
Consider that most big sites are using modular coding and mod_rewrite. So, in your example:
www.mywebsite.com/en/ (for english)
www.mywebsite.com/de/ (for german)
www.mywebsite.com/fr/ (for french)
en/, de/, and fr/ are not necessarily folders. They're likely being rewritten and passed as a querystring to some script, which fetches the content in the appropriate language. Now, on the back end, all the English may be in en/, and all the German may be in de/, and so on. But, that's irrelevant:
A site with enough resources to serve in multiple languages is undoubtedly plugging every content file (or database row) into a template. So, regardless of whether you visit www.mywebsite.com/en/ or www.mywebsite.com/de/, most of the HTML/CSS is being pulled from a common template file. The only part the differs is the English/German/French, which means you don't have to make a complete copy of every page for every language. You just have to make a translation of the differing content.
Of course, any site that has a translation team can probably afford to make a copy of every page for every language. But, they're still not going to, because it's silly. As you suggested, it's crazy.
I'm not sure I explained that very well. Did that make sense?
If you have a basic knowledge of Apache and content negotiation, then you don't even see how the folders are structured: http://www.gerv.net/hacking/language-selection/
alain
09-13-2008, 10:40 PM
this is ok if i can change apache configuration file, but i have a provider who allows me storage place on server, and i'm not allowe to change apache configuration.
so what can i do more ?
svidgen
09-13-2008, 11:50 PM
You can still do it--your URLs just won't as pretty without mod_rewrite. So, instead of site.com/en/ you would have site.com/?lang=en. Your index.* script then needs to pick its content file based on the lang attribute of the query string.
Make sense?
alain
09-14-2008, 09:34 AM
but in this case how do search engines (like google, yahoo, and so on...) will refere to my website ? only in 1 language
moreover, what about the rating ?
==> that's why my question :-)
svidgen
09-14-2008, 09:43 AM
Just make sure all your content is linked to from somewhere. If you have language links at the bottom of your page, all your languages will be spiderable. So, Google and other major search engines will be able to find and index everything quite nicely.
If you're concerned about search engines indexing pages with query strings--don't worry about it. There may be a few engines out there that ignore query strings--but all the major engines DO take the query into consideration. So, fear not!