I have a site with 20+ pages, all in English, and I am thinking about adding more languages. But I am having a hard time figuring out the best way to do this. Any suggestions and advices you may have, would be much appreciated. I am not using server-side scripting, if that means anything in regards to this. I am using CSS and plain html, creating static pages. But that could change, if needed. I like the idea of having separate text files, that could somehow be "fetched" by the main page on demand. But that probably need a dynamic environment?
I use the altivista Babelfish for translation to I think 8 languages. There are many others if you search for translation scripts. Here's the script <script language="JavaScript1.2" src="http://www.altavista.com/static/scripts/translate_engl.js"></script>
Thanks. I'm using Babelfish too, but feedback from visitors from other countries indicate that the Babelfish translations are more or less useless. They all say it's hilarious. My plan is to team up with people to translate my English pages and somehow implement their text into the pages. It is for this task, that I need help and suggestions.
It is true that Babelfish is useless. Since you've decided to take up the task of creating a multi-lingual site, you will need to select a default language (English is good, as it seems to be the lingua franca, or "common tongue" of the Web), but make sure that you make alternative language versions available via links on each of your pages. Placing them in the header (towards the right), or below your menu are good ideas. Then have each language version (including your default) in a separate language folder (like /en-us/ for example) or subdomain. You may also want to consider using geo-location (no, I don't know how to do that) to serve the appropriate language version based on the visitor's IP address. Just make sure you leave in the multi-language menu to aid in the accessibility and usability of the content.
I have a spanish/english site, where almost all pages are dinamically generated. Initially the URL for each spanish/english page was unique and on server I was looking at HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable (sent by browser) to serve english (default) or spanish page. But later I changed that because spanish pages weren't crawled by search engines. So now I have 2 different URLs for each page: 1 for spanish page, and 1 for english page. Many people use subdomains for this ("en.yoursite.com", "sp.yoursite.com", ...) but I don't like, because it's harder to be ranked high on Search Engines. So IMO is better to insert the language string as a subdirectory on your URL ("yoursite.com/en/page1.html", "yoursite.com/sp/page1.html", ...). That directories can be real directories on your server, but if you use mod_rewrite you can host your pages with another directories structure.
I added a translator via Google for the novelty and people actually use it. Hard to believe folks from Holland care about California housing!