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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/11/07 09:34
Scripsit Toby A Inkster:
>>> I'd like to set up a new site, which has to be multilingual
>>> (english, and my native language).
>>
>> That's bilingual rather than multilingual.
>
> Bilingual is a special case of multilingual.
Not really; "bi-" means "two", "multi-" means many. "Two" is not really a
special case of "many", except by a technical definition. If you know just
two languages, you don't know many languages.
In web authoring, two languages are essentially simpler to manage than many
languages, though this is mostly a practical issue. There's also a
difference between "several" and "many", though we haven't got separate
terms - "multilingual" covers both. For, say, five languages, you can still
have links to versions in the other languages on each page. With ten
languages, it becomes less convenient, and with fifty languages, it would be
awkward - on many simple pages, the menu of different language versions
could eat up most of the page visually. (So maybe then one might consider a
dropdown menu for it - something that people all too easily start using with
just a few choices, even on bilingual sites!)
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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