rinceWind,

As having done this with sites, let me tell you it's pretty hard to do well. Maybe our site just did it wrong but we would tag all text as "translatable." If the user was viewing the site in english, no big deal we would just output what was inside the tags. If they were viewing it in another language, we would extract the translated data from dictionary files. You could do a dynamic bablefish here. With a good caching scheme, only the first viewer paid the price for translation.

No the hard part is how much to tag ... where to tag ... etc. Translating by sentences can lead to some really fractured paragraphs and translating at paragraphs can lead to some really fractured pages. Translations also play havoc with layout. A simple four letter word in language A can turn into a 40 character behemoth in language Z. Maybe better use of stylesheets could solve that problem.

So doable? Yes. Doable well? Probably not. Doable enough for speakers of other languages to understand? Yes. Doable enough for speakers of other languages to be wow-ed? Probably not.

-derby

In reply to Re: Multilingual Perl applications by derby
in thread Multilingual Perl applications by rinceWind

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.