Hi, This is stuff we're pretty much used to deal with on a daily basis, here in Belgium. We have 3 national languages : Dutch, German, and French.
Not only do we do this on websites but also in regular software in which dynamic switching between languages should be possible, or printing in French while the interface is displayed in Dutch. Here you were talking about displaying the content simultaneously in Englisg and German. This is definitely easier to manage than dynamic language switching. The way I used to deal with this issue was to store all my content in a database and extract the text from one field or another (msg_fr, msg_de, or msg_en) based on the current language of the user. You can also achieve the same thing via external text files that you include in your main page (for example you have a page called mypage.php ... and this would include the content of mypage.php.de.txt if German is what you need or mypage.php.en.txt if English is required. The language of the user is usually stored in a cookie and you should apply a default language to a page. When you display the information, please mark your paragraphs with the appropriate lang attribute: either <p xml:lang="de">...</p> (XHTML 1.1) or <p lang="de"> (HTML 1.0). Please notice that your main page should be marked with a language attribute too : <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="en"> (XHTML 1.1) or <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="en" lang="en"> (XHTML 1.0) Mark the paragraphs with their language attribute only if they differ from the default language of the page. You can easily decide to hide text in a certain language via CSS: *[lang="en"] { display:none }. But this will NOT work with IE unfortunately. By using the lang attribute on your paragraphs, you will ease the pain of the search engines. If you want to implement dynamic language switching, you will have to implement a mechanism such as a link to a page that will update the cookie of the user: changelang.php?lang=en or changelang.php?lang=de. What thsi page does is very simple : it updates the cookie of the user and then gets back to the HTTP referrer (the page we're coming from so that it gets redisplayed). However, this can create some accessibility problems because it breaks the "back" sequence. Also, there may be some issues to solve with caching. Hope this helps Pat -----Original Message----- hi all this is the first time I've done anything like this but I'm wondering what it takes to display two languages (and therefore two charsets) on the same page? - English and German the content will be a side-by-side translation of each language thanx barry.b PS: no doubt I'll have more questions later but I'm starting from the display and working backwards to the content storage (ensuring the database can support unicode, etc) and then the content "capture" (a form in either English and German) ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
