We are having our site translated into Russian and Chinese, which obviously means that the text will be different to western letters! Has anybody else tried this?

I'm a little concerned about incorporating the text onto the pages. We are having the site translated and should recieve the new text back next week. How do i intergrate the new text into my site without having to cut and paste everything?

 

Is there anything else we should consider when translating our site? i.e. should we incorporate keywords (in chinese and Russian) Into the meta tags?

 

Sorry if these questions seem obvious but we are complete beginners and sometimes the obvious can be daunting!

 

Thanks for any help

 

John

y not an asian language?

 

Chinese IS an Asian language, unless you mean the Middle-East?

 

Anyway I'd imagine it wouldn't hurt to have Chinese/Russian keywords for Chinese/Russian search engines. Also I think I read somewhere that due to stringent laws on the Chinese national firewall that the website has to be hosted within China or it will probably get censored.

We've just recieved the Russian translation for our site. But it doesn't recognise the text, all we are getting is a lot of ??????????????????????????????????????????????????

Is there a way to solve this problem? If we did it in Photoshop and pasted the text on our site then the search engines will have difficulty finding us.

 

We will be adding an Indian translation also to the site. but at the moment it's the Russians and Chinese that are our main customers.

You need to tell the browser first that the content is in another language. You do this with the content-type meta tag. This forum for example uses :

 

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

 

The underlined part is the bit you need to change depending on the language. For Russian text, use charset=koi8-r (I haven't tested this, I simply found it on Google; see also: http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets).

 

I think it would be problematic to have several languages on the same page so you should probably use different directories (www.site.com/en/ or www.site.com/ru/) or different subdomains (en.site.com/ or ru.site.com/). It is also better to use translated/adapted keywords for the meta tags too. There's also a meta tag available to tell which language you are in :

 

For French : <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr" />

For English : <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />

...and so on. I don't know how useful this one is, as I believe search engines have better, automatic ways of finding the language. Still, it can't hurt!

 

 

Best of luck!

in order to make those letter appear , i put a sample from a script i made..

 

	<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="$lang">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=$charset">

 

and then each content of your website must be a variable or constant.

 

hope that helps..