Re: Multi lingual pages

Thank you Paul for your comments - very valuable! //frank 9 feb 2007 kl. 10.08 skrev Paul Novitski:

8 feb 2007 kl. 11.24 skrev Frank Arensmeier:

I would like to hook up on this issue a little bit more. I am wondering if anybody is willing to share some good advices regarding how to implement a good (normative) url structure so to say when it comes to multi lingual sites. Let me give you an example. IBM has many different domains including .se, .de, .com, .es and so on. But, all local domains are redirected to e.g. www.ibm.com/de or www.ibm.com/se and so on. Is this "common practise"? Right now, I am about to restructure my employers site. But, in contrast to for example the IBM site, I would like to bind the content to the corresponding domain - without redirecting the visitor. All english content for example will be under the .com domain, all swedish content will be under .se domain. Hope you see what I mean. I am not seeking advices about how to implement such a structure (I have done this already). I am more interested in pros and cons with either way. My hope is that the site will be more Google friendly.

My initial thought is that it will be confusing if you use national TLDs instead of ISO language codes. I see national TLDs as national indicators, not linguistic ones. I think it's appropriate to use a series of national TLDs for the branches of an international organization in various countries, but I don't see the one-to-one correlation between nations and languages that you're reaching for. Although using country codes or flags to represent languages might appear to work well with a very small and select sampling, it breaks down quickly when you include more groups. Maybe what would serve you better would be language-specific sub-domains, e.g.:

        sv.example.com (website in Swedish)

contrasted with:

        example.se (website in Sweden)

See: IS0 639-2 Alpha-3 codes arranged alphabetically by the English name of language http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php By the way, because your question is not how to implement such a system in PHP, perhaps this topic isn't really appropriate for this list. I'd suggest taking it to one of these:

        multiweb.googlegroups.com
        Webdesign-L
        WSG (Web Standards Group)

Regards, Paul __________________________ Paul Novitski Juniper Webcraft Ltd. http://juniperwebcraft.com --PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php