foeign language

davieboy

Is it possible to find a script that you can add to your site so that you can have language options?

eg: english
french
spanish?

Without having to write the content in the other languages?

David

cosminb

if your asking if there is a script that will translate your pages in different languages, the answer is no. But if you find one please send me the link

ps: ... if you make it yourself I think the guys at Google will be interested to

davieboy

i was wondering because the likes of the forums all have modules that will translate the pages

cosminb

they translate only part of the pages(if that is what they do). Most likely they include different HTML for different languages.

for instance if you have in french
"J'aime la glace" which means either "I like ice" or "I like icecream" how will your script know how to translate this without analyzing the context. And this is the big question: How do you analyze the context.
I don't think you'll find this kind of technoly in a php script and especially for free

davieboy

ok,

(damn)

dave420

You can do it. Easily. Whether it'll be accurate is yet to be seen.

http://babel.altavista.com offers a translation service. You could have a script called on each page, before output, which takes the page's contents, checks which language it needs to be translated into and sees if there's a cached version. If not, post the page's contents to babel.altavista.com and get the translation. Save that in your cache file, and display.

That's a simplified version, but if you need more info, please get back to me 😉

AstroTeg

Babelfish got me through several French classes (whew!). Machine translations really butcher the meaning of the converted language (sometimes they're dead on and other times they hardly make sense). In a case like a forum where you have local slang, translating it using a machine (such as babelfish) will lead to some very questionable results.

Give it a whirl and then get feedback from your foriegn language folks if it works for them...