| Kally M |
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kallymPrescott Valley, AZ 
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Hi,
I'm putting together a website. The client also wants Spanish and Chinese versions of the site. Do any of you have any resources for that? Thanks, KallyM |
| Spheric |
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user 2597674Prescott, AZ 
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Hi, Hi KallyM, As we know, most HTML presentations of text (ASCII) are "referenced by a character entity". Most browsers default to english as a character-entity set, but we can "tell" browsers what language, thence what ASCII set we are using by the "name space declaration". In XHTML, it looks like this for English: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/199... xml:lang="en" lang="en"> About a year ago we did a German language website so the name space looked like this: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/199... xml:lang="de" lang="de"> That told the browser to interpret our ASCII values in their proper name space so all the umlauts were um-lauted & etc. Now the other side here is the "character set". A lot of European language characters are represented in "our" character set, such as umlauts, just due to the commonality of European languages. Other languages need totally alien characters, thence keyboard layouts and the whole works, so we have character set definitions as well. Here's the one we use for Western English and in this case it's a meta tag: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> Consult http://webtools.live2... From there, for a Spanish language site, you can copy & paste in the Spanish text and the browser will maintain all your tildes & etc. Now for Chinese, things are getting a little more complicated. Try and copy/paste Mandarin without that character set loaded on your computer and you will get garbage. On the flip side if you install Mandarin on your desktop, you'll be seeing Chinese but then you won't be able to read and understand your own computer. A possible answer here is to have your Chinese language speaker type the text in Word (in Chinese) then save their document as .HTML, then you can steal the ASCII from that. Copy/paste that into your HTML document with your name space declaration and character set meta tag and that should do the trick. In doing this we take the classic way out: content delivery is the client's responsibility. We're coders, not translators. One last thing, make sure you know WHAT Chinese. "Most" Chinese speak Mandarin. Most American Chinese speak Cantonese. Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong, and many people consider Contonese to be "the business language" but this is no loger the case. Mandarin is the language of the PRC. Now just to make things extra, extra complicated, Mandarin and Cantonese are SUPPOSED to read the same (literally) but guess what you find? Not. And there's only about 100 other languages spoken in China. Finally, if the browser doesn't have the language installed, there's no way to make the client see Chinese (except in images) so watch you don't get slammed for that. Please consult http://www.w3.org/TR/... Best of luck with your project! |
| Kally M |
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kallym Prescott Valley, AZ
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Thank you for a great and comprehensive answer!
I'm a little embarrased, though. I'm looking for someone to do the work - I don't want to tackle it. I just want to do the site in English and then have someone experienced in multi-language sites to do the Spanish and Chinese sites. So do you have any resources for that? I apologize for not being more specific, but was very interested to read your answer. It will be helpful when I find someone to do the sites, especially the info about Mandarin and Cantonese. Thank you. :-) |
| Spheric |
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user 2597674 Prescott, AZ
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Thank you for a great and comprehensive answer! Hi KallyM, Ah, now I understand. We'd be very interested in helping you with this project. Multi-language sites help us get closer to the Webmaster's mission, to make information accessible to all people. Please feel free to get in touch: http://www.dataSpheri... |
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