Bilingual Site / English Spanish

[felgcastro]

Hello. My name is Felipe and I live in Canada. I plan to reach the spanish speaking market in Canada and the US. I purchased one site and would like to know if anybody could give me some general idea how design my site so the customer could switch languages ?
www.handbagsbydmg.com

Thank you

[Zegnarfol]

I asked SOL about them programming the site to have secondary language access. They will do it at a cost, likely starting from $150 and then upwards from there, depending on the site specifics.

[felgcastro]

I started working on this enhancement for my site. I have the home page so far. Although I will not publish this part yet until I have more pages done. I will keep you posted on what I have done.
Were you considering doing the same ? Translating your site to another language ?
There will probably be some parts which I won't have access to translate. I don't know yet.

[Zegnarfol]

Yep. Translating to another language can open new opportunities. It doesn't seem that expensive either. It's just a question of finding the best language which represents the greater pool of non-English language speakers interested in my product.

[KarenMac]

Have either of you tried using BABELFISH? Seems to me there is a freebie version of it out there some place, not sure how it works with SOL havent tried it personally, but I seem to remember someone here USING it.

Karen

[Zegnarfol]

There are some good translators that could be used, Babelfish being one mentioned as one of them. The idea I had in mind, was to have the pages already translated, with metatags reflecting the language-specific keywords for SEO on foreign language searches. Not sure if the programming SOL uses allows for this, though?

[cameraplus]

I have Babelfish on my World Cup site - see siggy link. Click one of the flags on the Babelfish box to get a translation of the current page.

Seems to work quite well, and it was easy and free to set up, though I can't comment on how good the translations are - any feedback on that would be appreciated though it's not too important as that World Cup is over and done now. Translations are done on-the-fly when you click the Babelfish box including all links and even the HTML page title. Doesn't seem to translate keywords and descriptions in the HTML source, but the translated pages don't permanently exist so they won't be in the SE's anyway. Once you're on a translated page, if you continue clicking links from there, you'll get the following pages translated to the same language too.

At one time SOL were planning on expanding their seminars and sales to Spanish speaking nations but don't think that ever happened. Guess a Spanish version of the Storebuilder may have come along with that. More recently SOL seem to have been cutting back on their seminar sales efforts and are going for the promotion of the SOL Express sites at the initial 90min introductory sessions (before the full day workshop seminars).

[KarenMac]

I also just found this from google. Called a google gadget. There are several of those, including calendars,weather etc etc

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&num=24&url=http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/115706042431009629871/GoogleSiteTranslator.xml&output=html

Karen