Hi Christina
We've done a bunch of these (from bilingual to five languages -
pentalingual?) over the last few years (not all museum sites) and have
tried all the methods mentioned so far. The separate tree for each
language, suggested by Susan Hazan is by far the most cumbersome to
maintain but is probably the only way to go if you have, as she did,
languages which require different coding representations. XML (as Bert
Degenhart) suggests is really good if you need to present the same
information in lots of different ways (in addition to different languages)
but can be quite a hassle to set up initially. We've done this with, among
others, hotel and leisure bookings and historical ship data with the view
that it is a good interchange format between different systems but there is
quite an overhead in getting the right schema (or DTD in the old days) set
up in the first place. There is also the hassle of the actions of different
browsers.
The most effective method we have used is a database-backed website with
every page generated by scripting. You don't embed text in pictures and
keep all text in differentlanguage tables. Almost all our sites are
db-driven and we use our own tools WebDev and MusDev
(http://www.dmcsoft.com/dmc/musdev.php3) for generating these. The
principle is the same, though, however you create the site, with a local
database, maintained with local utilities, exported to a web db for
displaying the website. Our usual format is Access locally with either
Access forms or a VB app to populate and edit the database and to edit the
linkbase, PHP scripting and a MySql db remotely for the website (because
it's free !). The advantage of this is that you can use the db to generate
other material also (catalogues, CDs, in-house exhibition displays) and it
may well be a database which already, at least partly, exists with your
accession data. (We have a paper on this repurposing stuff at
http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/mw98.php3
English-Spanish is generally quite well-behaved as the amount of space
taken up by text in the two languages is roughly the same (German, for
instance, with 33% more text, on average, and long compound nouns can
sometimes cause aesthetic display problems.)
Best Wishes
Douglas
The Highland Clearances
http://www.theclearances.org
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