For a new project I'm setting up the basis structure of the site. This new website has to be available in 2 languages. The most important content of the site are productpages with detailed product specifications (tables e.d.). In the past I've created a multi language site by adding the languages as a root node (ig FR and EN) and copy all the nodes from the base language (EN) to the FR node and translate each page. This is doable, but are 2 seperate sites, within the same domain.
For this new site, the second language is Chinese. So URL's are english, but the content must be in Chinese. Isn't it better to manage the products in a central matter? How to handle the translations in this case?
Anyone has a best practice for this case?
As with all things - It depends - mainly on how much content will be shared / is diffrent for each language.
If all the content is shared then you might want to look at using the vorto property editor to have all of your language content in one site - there is 1 to 1 Multilingual site project that might help you to set this up.
If the sites have little shared content then the two sites method is probibly the way to go - but i suspect you have quite a bit of shared content.
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If lots of the content is the same (i.e products) but there is some diffrences between the sites, then you might want to have two sites (once for each language) but share the products between them .
For this you would have the two sites, and then a products node at the top level of your site - the products would use vorto to share the content and have diffrent things in diffrent languages, but then you render the products pages into the other two sites (there is a bit of code needed for this - mainly ContentFinders and URLProviders) - this can be a little more complex to setup but will give you flexability if the other bits of the site are not the same.
Also shameless plug - do have a look at Translation Manager to handle the translation of the text for you - and as you are only doing 2 languages it will help you with that bit without you having to by a licence :)
This was one of the major issues we had when building our sites.
In the end, we opted for non-friendly URLs (i.e., only going by the page IDs), and a document type that held both English and Welsh fields. Simple and straightforward, and worked for us, but probably not the best solution if we were to ever add more languages.
We needed a toggle to switch easily from one language to the other, and as our Umbraco solution is in WebForms, ended up using the App_GlobalResources feature to help switch languages in the template.
Note we were operating under time constraints and importing from an older CMS, and may not take this approach if starting out again.
For each language there will be a language root (/en/ or /es/). All basis content needs to be created for each language. This content is quite static and does not change a lot. So I get pages like;
/en/page/about/something/
/es/pagina/sobre/algo/
They share the same documenttype, but are in a seperate content tree. The only problem is that I do not know what page is the correct page in another language. There is no reference.
The products will be stored in a different rootnode and will contain shared and language specific data. Even the URL text for that product can be set.
The entire contenttree will be the same for all pages (basis contentpage and advanced productpages). But each language can have it's only URL (english and spanish text in the url.
Using a custom ContentFinder or URLProvider, and then can say that all pages with /
Multi Language Best practice
Hi all,
For a new project I'm setting up the basis structure of the site. This new website has to be available in 2 languages. The most important content of the site are productpages with detailed product specifications (tables e.d.). In the past I've created a multi language site by adding the languages as a root node (ig FR and EN) and copy all the nodes from the base language (EN) to the FR node and translate each page. This is doable, but are 2 seperate sites, within the same domain. For this new site, the second language is Chinese. So URL's are english, but the content must be in Chinese. Isn't it better to manage the products in a central matter? How to handle the translations in this case? Anyone has a best practice for this case?
Regards,
Paul
Hi Paul,
As with all things - It depends - mainly on how much content will be shared / is diffrent for each language.
If all the content is shared then you might want to look at using the vorto property editor to have all of your language content in one site - there is 1 to 1 Multilingual site project that might help you to set this up.
https://our.umbraco.com/projects/developer-tools/1-1-multilingual-example/
-
If the sites have little shared content then the two sites method is probibly the way to go - but i suspect you have quite a bit of shared content.
-
If lots of the content is the same (i.e products) but there is some diffrences between the sites, then you might want to have two sites (once for each language) but share the products between them .
For this you would have the two sites, and then a products node at the top level of your site - the products would use vorto to share the content and have diffrent things in diffrent languages, but then you render the products pages into the other two sites (there is a bit of code needed for this - mainly ContentFinders and URLProviders) - this can be a little more complex to setup but will give you flexability if the other bits of the site are not the same.
Also shameless plug - do have a look at Translation Manager to handle the translation of the text for you - and as you are only doing 2 languages it will help you with that bit without you having to by a licence :)
This was one of the major issues we had when building our sites.
In the end, we opted for non-friendly URLs (i.e., only going by the page IDs), and a document type that held both English and Welsh fields. Simple and straightforward, and worked for us, but probably not the best solution if we were to ever add more languages.
We needed a toggle to switch easily from one language to the other, and as our Umbraco solution is in WebForms, ended up using the App_GlobalResources feature to help switch languages in the template.
Note we were operating under time constraints and importing from an older CMS, and may not take this approach if starting out again.
I'd recommend building a test site using Vorto.
EDIT: This link shows how we eventually found a solution for switching languages for our (webforms masterpages) templates, which, although it is working fine, is why I'd recommend looking into one of the Umbraco packages instead. https://our.umbraco.com/forum/templates-partial-views-and-macros/86736-page-events-eg-page_load-are-being-fired-twice
Thanks for your replies.
I'm thinking about combining 2 method's;
For each language there will be a language root (/en/ or /es/). All basis content needs to be created for each language. This content is quite static and does not change a lot. So I get pages like;
/en/page/about/something/ /es/pagina/sobre/algo/
They share the same documenttype, but are in a seperate content tree. The only problem is that I do not know what page is the correct page in another language. There is no reference.
The products will be stored in a different rootnode and will contain shared and language specific data. Even the URL text for that product can be set. The entire contenttree will be the same for all pages (basis contentpage and advanced productpages). But each language can have it's only URL (english and spanish text in the url.
Using a custom ContentFinder or URLProvider, and then can say that all pages with /
So an example product URL looks like this;
/en/product/very-nice-product-name/ /es/product/muy-buen-producto/
Each page can have a meta tag containing a reference to the corresponding page in the other language, with this meta tag:
Could this be a good approach?
I really like Jeroen's approach: https://our.umbraco.com/projects/developer-tools/1-1-multilingual-example/
I'm going to start this way. Thanks!
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