I was wondering if any of you guys have done a real multilingual website before (without using google translator).
What were the challenges? did you get to use language translation files? I want to hear details.

I am still trying to get my hands on foreign languages, but till date, the only foreign lang i can speak and write properly to an appreciable extent
is spanish. Somehow, i have never taken french classes seriously, but i will next time i have the chance.

Hire a babe from french school Yaba, while doing the job! As easy as that. And you gain 2 ways(If you know what i mean!)

The two ways reminds me of when i was a champion in X and O!

For what you seek, you will need the services of a human translator then as you may know, you store the words of the site in respective files (en, sp, etc), then you assign these the similarly named vars and you place those vars on the page in question. Then depending on the server you are using, it will either detect automatically or you can make the user select manually (as in lang=en, lang=sp, etc).

Donpuzo:

Hire a babe from french school Yaba, while doing the job! As easy as that. And you gain 2 ways(If you know what i mean!)

The two ways reminds me of when i was a champion in X and O!

Na wa for you DC. You and babe
I'm wondering how fat you are now

SHALOM

and how good is the google translator for websites?

@dhtml it is quite good, @suxe2005 u always write shalom after every post what soes it mean

@PCguru,

its my way of life man. Shalom means
peace so I luv peace to reign,

SHALOM

Donpuzo, say shalom to all your babes b4 your "exit".

*dhtml:

and how good is the google translator for websites?

Its a good tool, it goes beyond transliteration. The official language of the Datacenter I use for my servers is German. There's a "status" page which reports status of all the Datacenters and that page is in German language. With Google Translator(GT), I get the full info on that page and the sense is not lost.

If you intend to use GT, I think its good practice to keep your sentences short and made up of simple English. As long as the sentences are not kosovorical you wont have much problems with GT.

If it is the google translator I know, it is good but for a professional website, i consider it tacky - website visitors see the "google translator" icon placed on the site. To me it is similar to a professional company's website to list a yahoo/gmail address on their contact page.

The best would be to employ a server that supports internationalization.

I don't see anything wrong in using a third party service (the way it was meant to be used) to achieve a goal. Its like the SquirrelMail or whatever webmail client anyone is running on, would the fact that users are redirected to a squirrelmail login interface mean the site is unprofessional?

You can either use the GT as an API or use GT to translate blocks of text and fix them up the way Yawa's first post suggested. By personal preference, I will use GT the latter way.

Dual, yeah, it is a lil tacky to see GT's logo on cnn.com's or even facebook's website.

Don't get me wrong, I have used it on a couple of sites I have done for people but it depends on their "levels" - the more professional the site is, the more likely I go with the server approach.

there is this script library i saw on phpclasses.org once that uses gt, and does not show anything in your script

yeah iv seen that and though I haven't used it, I would recommend it highly. Again, tis not always a good idea to display generic plugins in an obvious manner on a professional-looking website that strives for uniqueness

Hello friends,,,,,,,sneha here,,,,,,and how good is the google translator for websites?

I wouldn't know, considering I don't speak any of the 50 or so languages it translates into but considering its speed and efficiency, and the fact that, given google's popularity, if they were wrong, they stood to be sued, I'd say it's pretty good.

Now that i can speak spanish at least at to an extent - i will say that it is very efficient - only if the sentences are short.
But one thing i do know is that, if you dont understand the language you are translating to, sometimes you will not get best.

Which means that, you still need a native human translator to assist you with the translation.

Using google translate for latin based languages is very good but not perfect. Though there are some things it cant just translate the way you want it to.

If you ever find yourself doing Asian translation for website or generic, please avoid using automated translators. Yes they will give you a general idea of what you need but quite often the grammar is wrong and totally off especially Chinese.
I tried using GT to translate sentences while I learned Chinese, it helped but grammar was off。It will get you into the door but maybe not get you to sit at the dinner table for a professional quality translation.

McDonald's or KFC fell into a situation like this in China maybe last year. There are some numbers and number combination in Chinese that are priced.

520 = I love you
888 = wealth, prosperity
4 = death = no no
etc

So in advertisements on tv and radio, one of the companies got a special telephone number with one of the novelty numbers that any company would like to have. Unfortunately for the company, when the numbers are written, everyone understands but when it was spoken, I am not sure they used a native Chinese speaker to say the numbers but it meant completely different thing that was leaning towards the annoying side. It caused a backlash.

It is best to always use a native speaker if you have access to one.

Though you will see many Chinese MP4 players, but some companies avoided using that because of the number 4 which means death depending on how it is spoken and skipped to MP5 players. I just thought they like adding numbers to things until I began to understand why.

There are many companies that have gone to Asian countries and were not able to succeed as they were importing their ideas into a very homogeneous society that takes pride in its culture.

When doing any translation work be very careful of what you do even if it is latin based like french spanish that may seem easy. Always get a second or third opinion from native speakers.

Exactly, the stuff cactus said is correct as far as i know.