Thread: Question about having a site translated to another language

I have a client who wants a site in two languages. I have managed to sort out the translation side of things, but here is my question.

What is the best way to basically create the translated pages.

My main concern is let's say for example I duplicate each page this way by naming them _french.html after every english page,

In other words 'index_french.html' enquiries_french.html etc etc... how will Google see this? will they read this as duplicate content even though they are transalted pages? Will Google get confused if this is an english or french site.... Would I be perfectlly ok to duplicate the meta data for then english and french version of the same page even though every page should be different?..... etc

If anyone can give me some good sound advice (not guesswork) please to the ins and outs I would appreciate it.

google should not count this as duplicate content because the text will be in two different languages......further more, google will even provide a clickable link (i.e. "translate this page)

It would be a good idea to provide the french pages with the metatags also in french.

(use googles translation service to create the meta tags)

I have an international club website with same content in different languages
operational for over a year now with no problems

good luck

Thanks David, appreciated.

Hi Ramsey, if you are using one template for all pages? Remember to allow a little extra room for translating between the languages. IE: The text maybe longer in your second language. Especially with different text formats like Arabic & so on.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by Collectors-info

Hi Ramsey, if you are using one template for all pages? Remember to allow a little extra room for translating between the languages. IE: The text maybe longer in your second language. Especially with different text formats like Arabic & so on.

Cheers.

The way I design my templates always allows for a lot of movement so yes hopefully this won't be an issue too much, thanks Chris.

Hi Ramsey,

My thoughts are:

Create a new folder in public_html and name it "french"

"yourdomainname/french/________.html".

and for the actual pages name them accordingly in French say "merci".

"yourdomainname/french/merci.html".

My tags for my familytree website below is all in both the Malay language
and English like a thousand island salad and it has not affected my search rating with Google or Yahoo.

Hi Ramsey,

You can test your meta tags here..........