Multilingual

[Peter]

Hi I have been asked to make a site which has been produced in Fusion 11
into a multilingual site. Has anyone any idea's how this can be structured
in fusion as they require all items to be translated including navigation
bar etc. Thanks Peter

[Max]

Hi Peter

If it's all going to sit on 1 domain name, then I would use a separate
master border for each language (with a language-specific header,
navigation bar and footer). To change between languages you can use a
flag or country-code text (on the page, rather than in the master
border) that links through to the corresponding pages in the other
languages. Set NOF to publish by asset type, but set up separate folders
for each language - en, fr, es, de, etc - and move the pages out of the
html folder into the folder for the relevant language. When published
you will then get addresses in the form:

http://mydomain.com/en/about-us.html
http://mydomain.com/fr/a-propos.html

(NOF won't have 2 pages called about-us, so its best to translate them)

Other options are to publish to subdomains for each language:
http://en.mydomain.com/about-us.hml (though I've not yet found any
advantage to doing this myself from the user perspective. From the NOF
perspective, this would mean (off the top of my head) having to to
develop each language as a separate web site - which could be an
advantage if you have several hundred pages, since NOF is generally
considered not to like very large sites, or an annoyance if you only
have a few pages.

Another option is to host each language on a local domain name:
http://mydomain.co.uk/about-us.hml etc. This would mean separate sites
in NOF. If you are selling a 'product' such as holidays in the USA, then
I'd use http://mydomain.com/de/about-us.hml for German visitors. If I
was selling computer peripherals in the UK or Germany I'd want (and
users would mostly expect) a country-specific domain. Note that some
countries restrict sales of domains to organisations resident in the
country, so that may limit your options.

One issue you may come across, mentioned in this forum a few times, is
that because NOF doesn't like accented / some foreign characters in page
title, you won't get them in the navigation bar either. You may need to
use a 3rd party navigation bar instead, or let NOT publish the
navigation and swap the button images for a set that you've made
yourself in a graphics program.

Final tip - do get the pages translated by a native speaker (and a
specialist professional translator if any technical jargon is involved).
If the site is going to change or expand significantly over time, this
could impose a significant additional ongoing cost on you / your client.

Max

----
Peter wrote:
> Hi I have been asked to make a site which has been produced in Fusion 11
> into a multilingual site. Has anyone any idea's how this can be structured
> in fusion as they require all items to be translated including navigation
> bar etc. Thanks Peter
>
>