Can Dreamweaver create a multi-lingual website easily

[Yael35885397ouch]

Hello everyone !!

In company we have developed a new website through Dreamweaver on HTML.
Currently the site is only in English and wanted to translate it into multiple languages.
I have to recreate all the translated pages or is there some other way?

Example: I want to make the site into German, the site contains 20 pages
I have to recreate all 20 pages translated into German, or there is some other system ??

Thank you all in advance for your help !!

[Moderator Note: Title updated for clarity].

[Jon Fritz]

There's nothing built into Dreamweaver to do this automatically. 

Before the site gets too big, I would suggest moving to a database solution/Content Management System where the content of each page is served based on the viewer's selection of a language. That would be the best/most future-proof way to set it up. The best part is, you won't be totally overwhelmed if/when the site grows.

WordPress has multi-lingual themes that allow for this out of the box.

[Nancy OShea]

There is a 3rd party plugin for WordPress called WPML that can help you & your staff create a multilingual website on WordPres.  Of all the multilingual CMSs I've compared, this one has the most advanced features.

• WPML: https://wpml.org/
• Pricing: https://wpml.org/purchase/
• Documentation: https://wpml.org/documentation/

Hope that helps.

[osgood_]

I'd go along with the response from Jon. Get the text translated into their respective languages by a proper human translator (not some online translator because they usually only do a hack job) then use a database to store the languages. At the click of a button or change of a drop down menu you can then call the appropriate language from the database. Unfortunately if you have never worked with dynamic content and databases this might be out of your comfort zone.

Alternately if databases sound a bit scary you could store the languages for each page in a javascript array of objects and again once a button or drop down selection is chosen you can populate the page with the appropriate language.

[L e n a]

To complete what's been said so far, and given that your site is quite light '20 pages' there are a few questions you'll need to answer :

• Do the pages contain long articles or large chunks of text?
• Or is it a communication website, in which you simply have basic information (title and small part of text, images, forms, downloadable documents, etc.)?

In the first case, you're going to have to build two autonomous and independent websites... I mean in terms of pages, and relationships, so apart from localization process, nothing very transcendent.

In the second case, you can juggle loading on the fly (AJAX) and only replace the content of the desired tags with Javascript by relying on a JSON file adapted for each language... here at the studio, we often do this for event websites... basically the HTML tags concerned could receive two complementary attributes,

<tag class="tbl" data-chain="reference">

• a .tbl class (for To Be Localized) allowing you to sniff the elements to target
• and a data-chain attribute i.e "reference" or "registration_title" to relate to the string to be associated in the JSON file

So, for each key in the JSON file, you place a set of definitions that may contain, for example :

• the type, which indicates the type of task to be executed: 'attribute', 'txt'... etc...
• the nature of the attribute, if the associated type is an attribute of course, such as 'src', 'placeholder', and so on...
• and finally, the value that will replace the existing value.

{
    "registration_title" : {
        "type" : "txt",
        "value" : "New text corresponding to the language."
    },
    "registration_link" : {
        "type" : "attribut",
        "attribut" : "src",
        "value" : "http://....."
    },
    // and so on
}

It works great, it's very flexible to use, and above all it allows you to only maintain one site during eventual modifications.