[Sigia-l] Multiple languages on a single web page

[David Heller]

Chiara,

If you were using Documentum's Web Publisher, we handle this
automatically in our WCM product ... I'll explain how we do this and
maybe your content management system can be customized to help you out
(or I can put you in touch w/ our sales dept, [jk]).

We have in our logic a concept known as fallback rules. Most of the time
every language/locale set falls back to English (US) but that isn't
always the case. If a piece of content doesn't have its translation, it
is set to fallback to the English (US) (in our example). Why this works
so well is that this doesn't effect the other aspects of your page (your
presentation). If your header, navigation, and other content on a page
is all translated, then it will appear translated with the English
version of the untranslated content displayed.

Some of this may be more difficult to do depending on how you are
managing your translations. For us each translation is a different
published site that gets produced in a separate directory that could be
accessed either as www.peoplesoft.com/locale,
www.peoplesoft.com/wcm?locale=var, or locale.peoplesoft.com. The choice
is up to you.

The key to this is that just because the content isn't translated, the
rest of the user's environment shouldn't be switched.

-- Dave

David Heller
Sr. User Interface Designer
Documentum: The Leader in Enterprise Content Management
925.600.5636
 
david.heller at documentum.com
http://www.documentum.com/
AIM: bolinhanyc  //  Yahoo: dave_ux  //  MSN: hippiefunk at hotmail.com
 
--"If it isn't useful, it will never be usable."