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

[diannes at dbfields.com]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, David Heller wrote:
> 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.

This seems to be the typical way of managing this issue, but FWIW I 
think it's still lacking from the perspective of usability. Personally 
I find it disconcerting to be at a site in Sweden (for example), be 
clicking happily through the English-language pages there, then click 
another link and *bam* land in a text-heavy page that's all in Swedish 
(which I don't read). All of a sudden my confidence about finding what 
I want is in the toilet--it doesn't matter if the menus are still in 
English if the page content is inaccessible to me, especially if it's 
something I really wanted to see. 

It occurs to me that one way out of this (for dynamically generated pages 
anyway) is to use language detection and to append a parenthetic note to 
link text for pages that are only available in languages *not* listed in 
the user's browser preferences: i.e. '<a href="...">Page title (in Swedish)</a>'
if the request lists the user's language preferences as en-US,fr,de. Yet 
I've never actually seen that done in practice. Has anyone seen something
like that tried, or know of any other workarounds for this particular 
problem? 

Dianne