What is the proper way to localize a static website

16
votes

I need to localize our site to a number of languages. The site consists of several static pages, no dynamic backend. We have a nice international community and the people are ready to help us.

The problem is how to arrange website translation, what is the right workflow?

What are the best practices for static website localization? How to organize language strings bundles? How to organize a workflow from string bundle to production web-page?

Is it possible to arrange translation in a wiki way, where several translators could translate a string bundle concurrently?

4
localizationwebinternationalizationtranslation
The best way depend on how your current web site is designed, splitted in the parts and so on. You wrote about some xml files which you use to fill the contain of the pages. So your website is not only a lot of static pages. Do you use jQuery to fill xml contain inside of html pages? An example of your typical page would be very helpful. Then the suggestions (answers) will be more oriented on your current design of pages. – Oleg
Oleg, thank you, I have found the solution to my case. We use string bundles and then generate static HTML pages from the bundles with XSLT transformation. – Pavel

4 Answers

4
votes

UPDATE:

As of March 2012, 99translations has been discontinued. Another similar service I've found is www.getlocalization.com/

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

You could use something like 99translations.com. Open a project there and ask your community to help with translation. For example this is how the guys at smartgwt did it

3
votes

I think this question has two distinct parts.

Technical: as it is a pure static site with no dynamic content, the translations will be provided in static pages as well. If you're running Apache, the mod_mime module lets you add language suffixes to file names, so that you might have mypage.html.en, mypage.html.fr, etc. - cf: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_mime.html. Other web servers might offer similar options.

Organisational: the workflow for website translation is a totally different matter; a Wiki or CMS might be helpful here, but they are at least difficult to realise with pure static pages. If language string bundles, resource files and the like are of any help, depends on your content, and in most cases will require to create pages dynamically. Which workflow you can support and maintain, largely depends on your (your organisations) capacity to handle it.

In my opinion, this problem deserves a more thorough analysis to get a satisfactory solution.

3
votes

I just saw a little project based on JavaScript/CSS that can fit your needs of static internationalization : stati18n (https://github.com/k-yak/stati18n) give it a try. Everything is explained in the readme file.

2
votes

in short:

  1. Is it possible to arrange translation in a wiki way? of course, there are a lot of open source CMS ( Content System Management ) that do this work for you!

  2. What are the best practices for static website localization? there is no best practicse for static website! since you have a community you must work with dinamic content, for your needs static site is bad practicse itself!

  3. what is the right workflow? Separate your views from your logic, Don’t use machine translation, Don’t concatenate strings...etc

Hope this help!