I've been dealing with multi-lingual content for a few years now in various project and my response would be: it depends.
I don't think there's a right or wrong, it always comes down to the business requirements. There are a bunch of questions involved with this: - How are you doing language "detection"? user settings-driven, by URL or maybe via browser settings? - What's the default language, is there a language selector? Maybe you could show that language selector just on the pages that exist multi-lingual? Or show a banner saying something along the lines of "We think your preferred language is German and we have this page available in German - do you want to change to German?" - Does the navigation match 1:1? How bad would it be if someone ends up on the secondary language site and wouldn't have certain navigation items available at all. _Personally_ I like your strategy more than building a separate navigation containing just the translated pages, but people might have a different take on it. Cheers Kai > This isn't strictly a CF related question but things have been kinda quiet > around here so I figure I'm not going to interrupting anybody and maybe we > can get some kind of discussion going on around here... > > What i am wondering is, on a website that is presenting content in various > languages is it best to treat the content entirely separately or do you > 'backfill' pages that might be missing in a particular language? > > Let me add some context... This is a website that is driven out of a CMS and > let's make the (perhaps rash) assumption that there is a default language > that all pages are initially created in. So, we're coming in and retrofitting > mufti-language support for an existing website. This process can obviously > take a lot of time but in the meantime the client is keen to show off at the > least the beginnings of this new feature, so we have a site that has lots of > pages but only some of which have been translated. > > My thinking is that when building the navigation and extracting the content > for an alternate language then if you hit a page for which there is no > content in that alternate language we will pick up the content from the > default language content and present that - perhaps with an annotation > explaining the reason they are seeing englsh rather than french for example. > > The alternative is to build just the navigation for the existing alternate > language pages. That just feels wrong to me but I've been known to be > mistaken in the past... > > To be honest I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to this question > but I am very interested to hear from anyone who has had to deal with this > kind of problem in the past - or in the present for that matter! > > Cheers, > > Brett > B) > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "cfaussie" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en.
