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hy ,

Do you know what we need to translate the website into many languages? and how many?

thx

[steveb]

There are about 5,500 languages in the world at the moment - they are decreasing by about 200 per decade as native speakers die off. Most of those languages have never been written, nor would it be likely that the speakers have (a) the ability to read, (b) the skill to read the Roman alphabet and (c) net access.

There are web services which can do mechanical translations from one major language to another. I have used AltaVista and Google to translate texts from German to English, which I then correct and stylize myself, but I already know both languages so I don't really save much time. The automatic translator only saves me the effort of reading through the text first.

Web users from Poland search for Polish language words and get Polish language results even when they use Google. Similarly, I find Finnish sites when I search for the local bus timetables using the Finnish language. This is a good thing.

If you want to make your site bi- or multiilingual, like my font site, you'll have to write the texts yourself and put them on different pages. Here is an example I have made using three languages Meilahden ortopediatekniikka / Tekninen ortopedia
The language changer links are at the bottom - På svenska means in Swedish and Suomeksi means in Finnish.

The reason this very specialised site is in these three languages is because the local Helsinki natives may speak either Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue (Finland is a bilingual country, officially - in practice almost monoglot Finnish) - but there are a number of disabled refugees locally from the Yugoslav crisis who search using English, since an e.g. Bosniac language search would throw up sites from B-Herzegovina.

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thank for you replay, I want something like Google, he translate instantly, but you have right beacause he generate some phrases that you can't understand, so the best way is to translate yourself or your coleg :P if you have some look with him

[haku]

Online Japanese-English translators are notoriously horrible. Japanese almost always leaves out personal pronouns, and as such the subject of a sentence is almost always inferred. Unfortunately online translators are not so good at inferring anything! So where it should be 'I did then, then he did that', the translation says 'it did this, then that was done'.