[wplug] Page translation?

Jonathan Billings billings at negate.org
Fri Oct 6 16:29:20 EDT 2006


On Oct 6, 2006, at 4:18 PM, Zach wrote:

> I've seen some sites such as Audacity and GTK which do automatic page
> translation. I look at the page source but it doesn't really tell me
> how they are doing this. Typically it will say something like
> "?lang=de" and this renders the page in German. Is "?" some PHP thing
> or is that Apache specific? Does "?lang=de" tell the webserver to call
> some translation script and passes "de" to it as the argument? Is
> there a way I can implement this automatic translation on the client
> side (I don't have control of the server side for my homepage)?
> Preferably something that is FOSS.

Typically when you see this, it's because the designer has  
internationalization (known as i18n in the wrong circles), which  
simply means they have a bunch of pre-generated translations  
available, and the backend knows to supply the appropriately  
translated text based on the language requested.  It's not doing  
generated translation, just picking up the already translated text.

Here's some examples of i18n: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro- 
i18n/ch-examples.en.html

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>




More information about the wplug mailing list