Best practices on internationalization

tvaughan

Howdy.

My company is developing a new site in Spanish, and I was wondering if anyone out there had some advice on best-pracitce standards.

What're the short-term and long-term trade-offs between encoding spanish characters via "escaped HTML" versus using a character set encoded number? Anyone have any experience in this or care to share some gotchyas?

Tom

mike_lin

Is this a standalone site? Or is it a multi-lingual website, available in various languages?

If it's the latter, here are some things to watch out for:

Localization
Check to see if there will be any localized content on the new site. For example, is there additional information that will be the Spanish version and not on the English version?

String externalization
If you're using a 3rd party vendor for translations, try to architect and separate out as much of the code from the content as possible. Sometimes translators have a hard time trying to pick apart code.

Templating
If you're using templating, I recommend translating the DCRs. You'll end up with another set of DCRs to manage (for example, spanish AND english), but it greatly assists with the localization and string externalization aspects.

Encoding
Make sure that every piece of the system (not just TeamSite) is set to the same file encoding (most likely UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1). Otherwise, things can get mucked up and not display properly.


Cheers,
Mike