Adding new languages to an existing website

[JEBerry]

Hello

I recently designed a very simple website in English using Dreamweaver 8. This now needs to be expanded into 5 further languages. I have translators working on the page contents but I don't know where to start with amending the website structure to allow a User to select a language. I would like the website to open showing the frameset and English home page with a drop-down for the User to select an alternative language. At this point the home page, buttons (in 1 of the frames) and relevant links should all change.

Any suggestions?
Jo

[Ninjax]

can you give me a link to the site please?

[kelly23]

Assuming you want to keep everything in frames (yuck :) ) you could just create a separate frameset for each language. When linking to each language, you would just link to the frameset page for each one with a target of "_top". (Does that make sense? :) ) Then that language's frameset would replace the original one in the same window.

[dMac]

i'm not sure what size outfit you belong to, and this might be a bit much, but here at work we have multilingual web we develop/maintain. all fot he content is stored on a database. The contenet is saved to a database, translated for each language we support so all of the body copy you see for english is also stored on the db in french, polish, italian, etc.

we store the user info on the database and when the a user logs in and their langID is 5 (italian) the we use langID, pageID and each element of text that has an associated id to query the database and return and display all of the copy for that page in the selected language.

this is a really high level description of what we do, but depending on your needs, it might be something worth investigating.