Multi-language CF sites

My suggestion is to first find a good translations service.  The hardest part of any multi-national site is

making sure your translations are correct.  Otherwise you end up with the chinese lawn mower manual effect.

You get:  "Important: To sever limb - Insert here." [there was a picture of a bloody detached limb next to an arrow pointing to the bottom of a picture of the lawn mower.]

Yes this did get the point across but a simple "CAUTION: Keep hands and feet away from the bottom of the mower while in use." would have been better and less morbid.

That was from an actual manual I once had.

Just check out Engrish.com to get an idea of how bad it can get.  Tracking your translations is important but if they are not correct in the first place then at best you end up on someone elses Engrish.com style site, at worst you loose all of your customers because they think your product will bring their dead ancestors back to life.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp

-Joe

I would also recommend reading over that link that Paul sent you.

And take a look at this riaforge project: http://rbman.riaforge.org/

It has a flex app for working with translations stored in a db, and can import/export to Java property files.

I would recommend against using Java property files though, because they make deployment a pain.  Particularly if you have multiple environments before production, and/or multiple web servers.  Better is having the translations in the database, and then caching them out to a data structure in the application scope on app start.

Cheers

you might start w/chapter 43

http://www.forta.com/books/0321679199/CFWACK9-2-echapters.pdf

I was just wondering if anyone has suggestions for building out large-scale sites in multiple languages.

That question is too broad to be asked on a forum.

I have look at the Google Translation API, but I'm not sure if it will do the trick or not. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

No.  Google translate is not fit for "professional" use, you need to use humans to translate human languages.  Google's getting better, but the text it comes out with sounds a bit mechanical.

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Adam