English & Arabic website

[Chester]

How do you do multi-language websites? I have a client who wants a website to be in English and Arabic?
I’m almost done with the design in PS and right now I don’t really know how to make it in Arabic. He wants it to be in WordPress also. Are there translator plugins for it? What are the things to consider? Fonts? HTML structure? Becasue Arabic is right-to-left?

How should I do this?

Thank you.

[Paulie_D]

How can you be done with the design when you are still asking such basic questions?

[CodeGraphics]

Did you check google translate? You can use it to translate the whole english text to arabic, then have a link in the english pages like: http://www.yourdomain.com/ar OR use php script to detect user’s ip address and serve the appropriate page.

But i think using google translate is kind of manual. Which will be hectic at every slightest correction or modifications in the english text.

[Kitty Giraudel]

> Did you check google translate? You can use it to translate the whole english text to arabic, then have a link in the english pages like: http://www.yourdomain.com/ar OR use php script to detect user’s ip address and serve the appropriate page.

Google translate is shitty as hell.

[Chester]

@Paulie_D. Yes, I am done with the mock-up in PS. Of course its in English. What I meant about the font is does all fonts out there support Arabic? I’ve used Museo in my design. Or does fonts nothing to do with translating it to Arabic?

@CodeGraphics, I haven’t yet tried google translate. I will give a try later. Thanks.

[Paulie_D]

Have you even considered that, culturally, it may need to have a different layout?

Yes, Arabic is read right to left…does your menu work that way?

Is your main content area on one side or the other? So you have a sidebar, what side is it on?

Does it matter?….I’m not sure but if you didn’t ask the questions up front and don’t have answers then , as I said, how can the layout be finished?

Fonts don’t support languages, languages are written in fonts (or more properly typefaces).

You can’t pick Arial and use some sort of setting/property to make it suddenly spit out Arabic. You have to use a proper Arabic typeface.

Will your layout support the Arabic script widths, I don’t know if the same words are longer than Arabic than English but they might be.

As for Arabic translations, employ (or at least use) someone who can translate idiomatic English into idiomatic Arabic.

I see so many overseas websites with poor English translations. Professionalism shows.

This is coming of as a bit of a rant which wasn’t my intention so I will pass onto the most obvious element.

In effect, you (or the client) is going to have to maintain two sites, one in English and a second in Arabic.

Yes, they may share some common layouts and styling but the content WILL be different between the two.

What I see most commonly for multilingual sites is the option to swap languages (usually indicated by a flag) and on click the relevant option you are taken to a new folder

http://www.domain.com/en

http://www.domain.com/ar

etc.

[bablucolno]

plz look this url http://www.fanoosi.com/home.htm i made this site in two language.

[Chester]

> Does it matter?….I’m not sure but if you didn’t ask the questions up front and don’t have answers then , as I said, how can the layout be finished?

Sorry about it. I didn’t know it was this complicated to make a multi-language website so I just jumped and designed it.

Its a burger site btw so my layout is mostly images. I’ll try to upload a screenshot so you could see.

Thank you for the comments. I now have some ideas about multi-language sites.

[Chester]

@bablucolno thanks, I’ll look inside the codes.

[Author]

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