Translatable Websites

Separate the content from the presentation

If you've every created a website, you'll know that you're immediately confronted with how the website will look in the browser. You write a few sentences and you're already thinking about how you'll create your next link or assign coloured text. Or, maybe you're working with a creative web designer who's great with graphics but hasn't stopped to think about how the website will be translated. These situations are referred to as mixing content and presentation.

The solution is to concentrate on your information and its logical structure first and build the website afterwards. In computer language, build means to let the computer create the web pages by adding the necessary code so a browser can interpret and present it to the reader. In a real-life situation, you would start by defining the main sections of your website (like the chapters of a book) and gradually add sub-sections. When you've done this, you build the website.

Create once and build as many languages as you like

The magic begins when you have your website translated. If your site is a translatable website, you can give the translator(s) the text so they don't get bogged down by the code. When the text has been translated, the website can be built again - this time in the foreign language. This process can be repeated for as many languages as you require.