Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

16.1. Developing Multilingual Web Sites

Douglas Adams' science fiction parody The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes a fanciful creature that might have made this section unnecessary. The Babel fish provided instant language translation, a service computer scientists have long sought to provide using software. If machines could reliably translate all the nuances of human language, there would undoubtedly be translation layers available on both client and server that could present any and all Web content in the language of each user's choosing. Alas, this vision has proven elusive — the services available on the Web produce obtuse and sometimes humorous results, and even the best machine translations must be checked by a human. For the foreseeable future, human translation will be a part of any multilingual Web site.

The translation problem is compounded in a WCM system because its text comes from so many places. In a typical SharePoint Publishing site, in addition to the authored content, an end user will see text that originates in the master page, in site metadata such as column and container names, as well as text that comes from SharePoint itself. Some text is simple string data, while other text is embedded in image files. In order for a user to have a good experience, all of this must be localized.

Many computer products claim to have multilingual capabilities, but this term is subject to a broad range of interpretation. The following table shows some of the possible ...