Thursday, February 12, 2009

Imagesets in content management

Hippo CTO blog - Arjé Cahn
Slightly harder is a situation where you need the image to be translated into 21 different languages, because it's part of the website's navigation. The "About us" button in that case might need a translation workflow process that runs the image through a number of qualified translators and designers. You'll end up with one handle containing 21 different variants (with images that state "Au Sujet de Nous", "Over ons", "关于我们", etc).


I can see why a website would be designed that way; but usually the home page is set by the origin of the inquiry. For example, if I go to the Deutche Welle website I am automatically directed towards the English language homepage, presumably an inquiry originating from Germany would land on the German language homepage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Alice,

Thanks for your comment! You're right - in a lot of cases there is a different homepage or even an entirely different website for a specific language/locale. The case I'm describing however, is when you have a site that is translated one-to-one into a bunch of different languages. This happens frequently for governmental websites, for example. When every page must be available in two or more languages, then it makes sense to work with language variants and imagesets as I described. The complexity here is in keeping track of whether every page and every image has been translated before it's pushed live. This requirement is not needed when you have different sites for different languages, as you suggest.

Obviously, with Hippo CMS 7, you can do both :)

-- Arjé

Alice said...

You're so right and it is incredible that an American missed that, for it is common in our country to have websites, especially government websites, that need to be translated into several languages.