MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Hi
I need to build a simple website, which I want to be available in English & German. I had a look at the Wordpress video on multilingual sites and the first two options were just so cringingly awful that I can't face going that route. I had assumed that there would be a simple tool out there that allows the user to browse the site and swap between languages easily without losing their place on the site. Would also be helpful if the English version of a page could display if the German one wasn't available (but not essential by any means)
Taking it a stage further, would be good if the SEO goodness from each site fed the other, but I appreciate this is asking a lot and my SEO knowledge is pretty limited.
Also, leaving aside the multilingual aspect, and recommendations of what to use or not, would be most welcome.
Grazie
Bit more detail on the site:
MTB Guiding site with the usual stuff:
* Contact Details/About
* Contact form
* Details of trips
* Route descriptions
* Photos etc
<Edit: This example site on Squarespace shows pretty well how I don't want it to work. It's basically two separate menus and two separate site trees: https://venture-multilingual.squarespace.com/kontakt>
What I want is one menu and a language button. The language button dictates the language the content on that page is displayed in
Drop me a PM and I can show how I did it for a club site. Might not be pretty but it does work and is easily extendable.
Too late for the edit.
The version I have has an index page that loads specific content so index.php?page=contact will load contact.php into the content area. It uses a cookie for the language, defaults to English but reloads in the new language when it's chosen.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/business/translator-api/
Works well, iirc you get so many free translations and you can translate dynamically using the API or statically and drop the content into a resource file.
How you implement the translation on your site depends on the site and coding language.
Hi Whitestone. Many thanks for sending that. Seems to work exactly how I want it to, which is no surprise really since I guess you coded it from scratch the way it clearly should work?
I should have said that I'm ideally looking for some sort of tool rather than building it from the ground up. Ie built in themes etc. Don't want to spend too much time on it.
Hi duckers. That does look cunning, but not quite what I'm after. I'll do the actual translation myself, perhaps with some help from the kids/wife.
The key bit I'm after is some sort of website builder that makes adding new content/pages easy and allows you to switch languages in a slick way.
Squarespace, WordPress, Windows type of thing.
Anyone got anything good or bad on those ones?
Perhaps useful to add a bit of context, it's not a coding challenge I'm after here. About 20 years ago I helped build a multilingual website which stored all visible text in the database and switched seamlessly between Ming Lui Chines, English and French. It won various awards from Computer Weekly and Microsoft.
Then around 15 years ago I built the first Welsh version of the UK Charity Commission website.
But both of these took months and tens of thousands of pounds. I was rather hoping that in the intervening decades the various CMS sites had caught up and provided something similar fior very small businesses to knock something up for themselves without having to be designers or coders.
It'll no doubt get it's knockers but maybe consider Microsoft SharePoint websites?
Looks like it supports multilingual content too.
No problem.
Yeah, I pretty much coded that up myself. There's really only two ways to do it cleanly: either have parallel document (or snippets/partials) trees and switch between them which is how I've done it; or have one document tree that consists of placeholders and those pull in the appropriate language. The latter is usually used in embedded systems where there's limited text, something like your TV decoder box. Mostly it's an organisational problem rather than a coding one.
I've not done much (understatement) with Wordpress but any tool/add-on/plug-in will have to work with that framework.
Lastly, just rely on the browser to do the translation - Chrome offers to translate pages in other languages to English when I visit them. Quite how good the translation is I can't say as my Polish isn't that good!
I did a search for "multilingual wordpress sites" and got this as a hit - https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/ anything in there do what you want?
If you go the Angular route, it's certainly possible but might be overkill for your requirements.