Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/11/07 07:14

Scripsit Ikke:

> 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.

> Now I'd like to ask whether or not this is possible - I know it's
> possible to translate all the pages and use index-en.html and
> index-nl.html etc, or even use subdirectories, but I'm still faced
> with some problems.

It's probably best to use subdirectories, for easier management.

> First, there is only one index.html - which language should I use
> here?

In theory, you could make it appear in the language of the user's choice.
See
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/
But I don't really believe much in "language negotiation" any more. It's too
probable that many of your Dutch-speaking visitors are using an English
version of a browser, probably left at the factory defaults for language
preferences, and this typically means that English (or, worse still,
specifically US English) is declared (by the browser in HTTP headers) as the
only language that the user understands at all.

> Logic dictates that english is more popular than dutch, yet
> most of my visitors will be dutch.

You could make it Dutch, with a prominent link like
<div lang="en">This site in English: <a href="index-en.html">...</a></div>
(where "..." is the name of the site in English) near the start of the
document. Naturally you would have a similar reciprocal link in the Dutch
version.

Moreover, put similar links to the other language version on every page. The
reason is that when someone stumbles across a subpage of yours, via Google
or via a link, the availability of the page in another language might be
crucial information.

> Second, is there a way to remember the language a user selected? I'm
> thinking cookies here - is it possible to use cookies without using
> JavaScript? And reading them? If I'm using JavaScript, I'll be
> limiting my audience a little, I'm afraid...

Cookie settings don't require JavaScript, but why would you use cookies?

You would simply have each page link to other pages in the same language
(except for the link to the version of the page itself in the other
language), so users will automatically stay within one language version,
unless they decide to move to the other.

P.S. Please don't do as I've done - a bilingual _page_ is generally not a
good idea, even if a bilingual _site_ might be. I'm just too lazy to change
things now.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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