Multi-lingual sites

So, I’m having to produce versions of one of my sites in several languages: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean and Norwegian as well as English.

I have no problems with setting up a snippet to give links to the various different pages and parts of the site. I also have no problem in setting up the various navigation structures.

What I’m not really sure about is how I can be sure that the pages will display properly. For example, fonts. Right now, I declare ’Lucide Grande’, Verdana, sans-serif as the font stack for the text. How can I be sure that these will cover all the languages on all computers?

In the header I declare
Do I need to change that language declaration for each different language section? Even in those sections, there will be *some* text in English. Or should I be marking up the parts of each page with lang="ar" or whatever?

In other words, I really don’t know what I’m doing here!

Anyone done this before and dealt with these issues?

Beside using the ’Lucide Grande’, Verdana, sans-serif combination use the Arial, verdana, sans-serif or Tahoma, verdana, sans-serif to make sure you get the characters rendered in each and every languages.

Possibility of getting trouble with header type declerations is nearly 0% so leave it as is for all the languages you have.

To make sure about how your site is alike on various systems the best bet would be screen-capturing of the final result/actual site.

Nothing more to care about in multilingual-sites as i know!, There might be more knowledgable folks who can assure you on these steps.

All the best :-]

Thank you, MotSmart!

As far as you know, would there be any harm in declaring a different language in the header? As I am going to have to make different templates for each language anyway, it would be easy enough to do.

Quote from: PatrickSamphire at Apr 01, 2009, 07:06 AM

Thank you, MotSmart!

As far as you know, would there be any harm in declaring a different language in the header? As I am going to have to make different templates for each language anyway, it would be easy enough to do.

That’s OKAY, No problem in declaring even the false header-type references which doesn’t match to the content language, But why not being strict to rules when you are about to have templates for each and every language you feed? thus no harm at all as i know!.