Hello everyone, I’ve finished restyling my personal website (I still have to work on it a bit) where I talk about my works and show the things I make. I was wondering if it was possible to insert the double language (English) on the pages already created without having to create a double site (Italian/English). I thought of these solutions, in your opinion which are the most functional? Does anyone have the same problem as me?
Google Translate
I’ve noticed that if I try to translate automatically with Google Translate, for some reason the page design gets corrupted. Sure it’s not very elegant to use Google’s service for translation, but it’s certainly a possibility.
Double paragraph
I would leave the Italian text at the top and the corresponding English translation at the bottom. Maybe I should do it the other way around since my work is aimed more at an international audience than an Italian one. This however was another idea.
Pop-Up!
Or insert a pop-up that can be activated by the user (for example by putting a button with a flag) that once clicked translates only that part of the text in the desired language (I imagine that it will take a lot of work…)
not really a double site feature, but using the multi language setup on Sparkle allows better experience for the visitors - if you know how, you can even redirect geolocated IPs to their language page automatically, making it seamless. So using the Sparkle built-in feature is my recommendation (creating a English section with /en/ directory and using the feature on the pages to set up its main language)
From a SEO point of view having pages in a single language is preferable, I think it’s generally advisable unless the site is about language comparisons (which would require setting a language attribute at a paragraph level, something Sparkle is not quite equipped to do).
if i search andre dupke on my google, i’ll have the latter. If you search on Ireland (or any english speaking country), you’ll have the first. Chances are i’ll only see the subdomain instead of the main domain (considering that you made both with their respective languages set-up, even using Sparkle)
Geolocating makes that if i somehow access the main domain by mistake, it will drop me into the subdomain that have my language. Google has nothing to do with it
Nope, the google Location in Europe e.g. is ALWAYS Ireland, it will only index the English website, if an automatic location - language switch is active…
yea, because there will only be one website… what i’ve said is that you create different subdomains (which technically are different websites) with the website translated and set to that translated language. There isn’t automatic translation anywhere on my answer, just automatic redirection to that specific subdomain.
As a writer, I strongly recommend NOT using automatic translating on websites for anything apart from the most basic info sites. They are really easy to apply, but the results can be very confusing. It is far better to get the translation done by someone whose job it is. A site I recently worked on spoke about “music blending” in the French translation when of course it was music mixing that was specified in the original version. Two or three errors like that will leave a very bad impression on the reader.
Hello and thank you for the advice.
The core of the issue, however, is not the translation (although I agree with you that it has to be done well), but the fact that you can insert a quick way in Sparkle to provide visitors with dual language. Creating two websites, one with one language and one with the other, is certainly not convenient, so letting an automatic translator do it for you is one of the best solutions at the moment if you don’t have time to do two sites. Of course, the translation will be less reliable, but it also depends on the type of site you build…