Creating and maintaining html-pages with different languages?

[Hans Meier]

Hello,

I'm using NVU (OS: Windows XP) to create some tutotrials in html.
The tutorials are only used local on the users PCs.
Now there is the need to do this in German and in English.

But how I can make this easier? Now I have to change
any page twice, once in German, once in english.

Is threre any (database-)Editor available, which seperates
the layout editing an the text editing?

What I want to do: I have one layout of a html page.
Also I have a database which stores the english and
german text for this html page.

Doing just one click the tool creates two pages, one with
english text, one with german text.

I'm looking for a tiny tool, I don't want to use
server bases systems.

Many thanks for any hint!

Regards

Hans

 

[SpaceGirl]

Hello,

I'm using NVU (OS: Windows XP) to create some tutotrials in html.
The tutorials are only used local on the users PCs.
Now there is the need to do this in German and in English.

But how I can make this easier? Now I have to change
any page twice, once in German, once in english.

Is threre any (database-)Editor available, which seperates
the layout editing an the text editing?

What I want to do: I have one layout of a html page.
Also I have a database which stores the english and
german text for this html page.

Doing just one click the tool creates two pages, one with
english text, one with german text.

I'm looking for a tiny tool, I don't want to use
server bases systems.

Many thanks for any hint!

Regards

Hans

That's NOT the way to do it really... using server side 'systems' you
could have as many languages as you wanted... I dotn know of any tools
that would really let you do this easily. I think you'll just have to do
it by hand.

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[Jukka K. Korpela]

Now there is the need to do this in German and in English.

But how I can make this easier? Now I have to change
any page twice, once in German, once in english.

Indeed. That's the dominant cost of multilingual authoring, unless the
pages are created to be abandoned soon.

Is threre any (database-)Editor available, which seperates
the layout editing an[d] the text editing?

Use CSS, Luke. Separate content from presentation, and your HTML
document will be nice and clean. The CSS code is normally independent
of the natural language used, but see some caveats:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/multicss.html

In clean HTML, you say nothing about any layout. That's the ideal, and
things won't go very wrong if you use a casual presentational attribute
or so. What matters is that you don't have a spaghetti of nested tables
and font tags and whatever

What I want to do: I have one layout of a html page.
Also I have a database which stores the english and
german text for this html page.

I'm afraid you don't know what you are asking for. Any database system
is more complex than the do-it-by-hand system that you have now, which
is more complex than the simple approach I suggested. You _still_ have
to organize the translation and the updates.

 

[Andy Dingley]

What I want to do: I have one layout of a html page.
Also I have a database which stores the english and
german text for this html page.

This is fairly run-of-the-mill stuff. However the "database approach"
has additional costs over static pages. It's a question of how many
pages you have, as to which is best for you.

I do this by using a SQL database, storing the content as XML
fragments, then using XSLT to turn these fragments into pages.

The "page" contains fragments in either XHTML or DocBook - both XML
formats. The multi-language content is embedded _within_ the page,
i.e. there are sections within the XML fragment that are labelled as
either English or German, and these are selected by the XSLT. If
there's no content of the "right" language, then it's easy to default
to another one, rather than leaving the page empty, This also reduces
the amount of duplication needed to to embed untranslatable resources
like images - they need only appear once and they have their
annotations tagged for language and duplicated.

Only if I had a major task of workflow management (i.e. organising a
team of translators) would I start to store the multi-language
versions as separate database entities.

CSS is useful, but it will _not_ solve your page generation problems.
You have a large site, so you have a problem in updating navigation
trees. You also have a navigation tree that is (presumably) static
across languages, yet is labelled with varying languages. This means
that you need to generate HTML navigation (<a> elements) with varying
_content_, and that's more than CSS can do.

You also have a problem of authoring, in that there will be many
authors of content who are not HTML experts, nor should they be. A
database-driven approach is a route towards solving this.

I would probably go with the database, XML, XSLT solution for anything
more than a handful of pages. You might like to look at existing
products like MySource Matrix, rather than building your own.