Hi. Possibly very stupid question but does anyone know what special considerations are needed (if any) if you need to design with foreign characters (Chinese in this case)? e.g does it limit what you can do in any way? I'm interested to know if it would be possible to have a website designed here (in UK) in English then have translated pages added separately or does the language issue have to be considered during the initial design? thnx

Unless your fluent in Chinese (or any language your asked to translate to) it is going to be difficult.

 

Google toolbar will allow you to translate a page into another language with the click of a button to see what it will look like, but you can also integrate the google translate into your website, or even give a link with a flag icon to translate to a specific language.

 

This will take the coding aspect out of it and you only need to create the site once and allow google to translate it.

 

However, if you want to have an english and a chinese version of the site, you could use Google Translate to translate the page for you and then place that content into a new page as the chinese version.

 

This would be the only real way to determine if the layout will fail as a result of the different language imo.