translating a website into chinese

what kind of tools are available for this kind of a project. is the only way of accomplishing this to make an entirely new site in chinese? what about text in databases?

i'm trying to explore many possibilities, so i hope somebody out there has some experience in something like this.

I used ASP and Access to do a site in 6 European Languages. Boy was it a long process but once up and running it was much better than creating 6 sites! All I had to do was output the table to Excel with the english version in row one and no other languages. Run the spreadsheet through a language conversion tool to create a 6 row Excel spreadsheet. Then import it into Access. That was it. The languages took 5 minutes to add, add any subsequent language would take about 1 minute. So my reccommendation is go the database route.

I might be wrong here but can't you just change the ISO format code in the HTML header for the correct language


Probably not but there should be some easy method for this, i mean eastern countries can access western sites


Mark

I don't know, you could but I'm sure that would only change the letters to the right characters and not actually change the words to the right order or spelling. I'm not even too sure it would change the characters at all. I think it's just to tell the client browser which font to use to render the text.

Yeah binky it was just a passing thought, i never really looked into it, but you could take a look at how phpMyAdmin do language translations this might give you another ideas


Mark

binky.

what language conversion tool did you use? how acurate is it. my main goal has shifted slightly to not have to outsource to a translator every single time we need to add new content to the site. that would be sucky.

http://www.systransoft.com/

I went with Systran in the end because I trust it reasonably well. It seemed accurate enough though I couldn't tell with some languages and just had to base my judgement on others.

More good language tools


http://babel.altavista.com/
http://www.google.com/language_tools


Mark

Nothing I can really offer in terms of help here

However in terms of using Chinese I don't see how you can store *characters* (hanzi) in a database You could use Pinyin instead. Eg Wo jiao Zitan (I am called Zitan)..., but then you would miss the tones Eg Wo (I) is third tone ). So storing this in a database is tough. Maybe there are some open source pinyin translators/parser or something??

I did the http://babel.altavista.com/tr translation and they bring up Hanzi no problems, so obviously it has been done.

Anyway good luck and let us know how you get on :-))

Zitan.

Uh... Unicode supports Han. (www.unicode.org), and AFAIK MySQL supports Unicode chars so storing it in the database shouldn't be a problem.

i've found this (http://www.mysql.com/doc/A/d/Adding_character_set.html) in the mysql documentation.

I am really interested in this subject. Right now I am trying to build an English - Indonesian electronic translator. (Should I open a new thread?) I need more resources about Machine Translation. Is there anyone know where I can find the right stuffs that I need? I need everything, concepts, algorithms, methods, everything ...
Thanks for your help!

Yes, open a new thread in the Project Help forum.

Just so you know jagerkiss, you're entering into what is one of *the* most complex problems being attacked by computer scientists and linguists today.

And one of the most complicated areas for anybody in Newcastle (UK), how to talk proper like!

The English amongst us will understand that one. It's funny how the (enter hyour nationality here) speak better English than geordies.

*NB - for anyone not in the know, a geordie is a native of Newcastle, and we speak like this:

'Whey man there's nee way am gannin te the toon wi the rest o' yuz'

And that's english believe it or not.