So you want to have a multilingual website? Well, get ready to work hard!
There are many things to keep in mind. Your pages need to be available in two, three, sometimes more languages.
No problem you say, you can translate your content. Yes, that is a must. But there are more things to keep in mind.
There are many questions you should ask yourself.
What is the default language of the site? Which language should you greet your users with? Having a menu to select their language of choice is necessary.
You have to keep your pages up to date. If you make a mistake, you must address them in all the languages. Your pages should always be linked together. The menus, headers, all that stuff that you assumed are static because they are the same on every page have to be translated too.
There are several ways of linking pages.
Consider a website with a Reading List page. A URL in english would be /reading-list.
Now if you had a translation in spanish, which URL should it have?
/es/reading-list: Very simple, just add the language code at the start./es/lista-de-lectura: The URL is also translated here./lista-de-lecturaOr all of them?
Having an automated way of linking pages is very useful. That’s what makes having a simple website a very complicated thing.
Each page can’t exist independently, unless you want to manually link translated pages.
Some pages serve as an index for others, for example, a blog’s home page, or a page for a tag, listing all the posts with tagged with it.
Should you have a separate index for each language? Or mix both languages on the same page?
Don’t do this! I don’t want the website to assume which language I speak. Let the users choose. Perhaps they’re trying to learn a new language.
Keep in mind that some images will need to be translated.