Re: [xsl] multilingual web site

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:00 5-03-2001, skhurshid@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I'm a software engineer and am looking
> for ways to make the internationalization of our web site
> more managable. Currently we maintain seperate html
> documents for each lanaguage. Since the layout of the documents
> is very similar (just the displayed text
> differs in language) I figured there must be a mechanism
> for maintaining a single html document and generating the
> translated html documents from this single document. I'm
> thinking of using xml & xslt as a possible solution. Has
> anyone used similar solutions ?
> I would greatly appreciate any suggestions on this issue
> or if someone could point me to other resources.
> Something with examples would be great.
>
> I'm envisioning a solution such as:
>
> an xml file with the following:
> <pagetitle>MY PAGE TITLE IN ENGLISH<pagetitle>
>
> which would be translated into:
> <pagetitle>MY PAGE TITLE IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE<pagetitle>
>
> and an XSL (or XSLT) file which would take this XML file and translate
> it into and HTML page.

Well, the XSLT isn't going to *translate* it for you - you need to have all 
the multilingual content available somewhere.  The best way to store it 
really depends on how you plan to maintain it.

If one language is canonical and the others are all translations, then 
having one document for each language might make sense.  You could process 
all of them with the same stylesheet to produce identical-looking HTML in 
different languages.

Another approach would be similar to what another poster suggested; a 
single document with each chunk of text presented in multiple languages.  A 
transformation into a particular language's HTML would simply ignore any 
content as being tagged for a different language.

At 11:49 5-03-2001, skhurshid@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Following up on the message I posted earlier, I was wondering whether 
> there are
> tools out there which could seperate HTML into XML & XSLT ? We have hundreds
> of HTML files and I'm looking for anything that could make this easier.

There are a few tools out there; one that I remember seeing is Percussion 
XSpLit (<URL: http://www.percussion.com/ >).  I haven't used it, but it's 
probably worth looking into.

-Chris
--
Christopher R. Maden, XML Consultant
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >


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