Multilanguage website based on wordpress

  • Hi.
    I need some good advice on how to turn a WordPress site into a multilanguage site. We have a central installation already in place, and we have registered all the scandinavian top-level domains for this site, meaning .no .se .dk

    We’d like the contents of the blogs to be available in their original posted language, but the theme and user experience for the site needs to be available in both Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.
    The three Scandinavian languages are mostly similar to some extent, and the posted public content should be available and searchable for all users regardless of their location or usage of our .no .se or .dk domains. Only the theme and dashboard experience (including plugins) needs to be available to the users in localized versions.

    Any tips on the best way to go about setting this up?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Are you using human translators or a computerised method?

    Thread Starter xrun

    (@xrun)

    Human translation is fine, the point is to set this up so that the theme and dashboard is localized for each of the domains. F.example the comment buttons should be worded in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, depending on which of our .domains our site is visited through.
    The posted content in the blogs will be left in its original state. If a post is written in Swedish it’s gonna stay Swedish regardless.

    This may help, though I don’t know the details: WordPress in your language

    Thread Starter xrun

    (@xrun)

    Yes, well we already have translations. The thing is to set this up in such a way that the site is displayed in one of the three scandinavian languages depending on wether the site is visited on its .no .se or .dk domain. The language is really not the problem, showing the right one of the three available is the thing.

    As I see it, there are several possibilities. We could install the site in three different localized versions on each of those domains, and let the three installations use the same database. Not sure if that would work well, because having all the content available to each of the sites would mean they all need to use the same table prefixes.

    Or we could use a single installation, and determine the language of the browser or operating system, and give the visitor a localized version based on this. The problem with this is that many people in Scandinavia prefer the English version of both operating systems and browsers, so they would get the site in English instead of Norwegian, Swedish or Danish.

    If it’s possible, we could have a single installation still, and maybe determine the language to be shown on wether the site is visited on its .no .se or .dk domain, but as these all are forwarded to the same installation this would be somewhat tricky and may not work in some browser configurations. The reason for this would be that browsers with high or custom security settings would warn the blogger about being forwarded, and could either jump to the main .com domain where the actual installation is, or cause some other problem that would gum up the work… and the user experience.

    There may be several other workable solutions, though the first alternative I mentioned here seems to be the best one so far, if it is possible. If there are people with experience setting up such a site, please chime in. ??

    Does anyone know if automatic translation can affect to seo rankings?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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