Proposed FAQ/Techniques on linking to translationed pages

Chaps,

I've been asked again recently how to deal with pages where there are parallel translations, and thought it might help to write an FAQ (which will be quite close to a techniques section in approach).

Here is what I'm thinking of saying for people who only have a small number of translated linguistic alternatives (if you have country-based alternatives or too many alternatives to fit on the current page, there are some differences):

- Use content negotiation based on HTTP headers where possible to take users to the most likely localized page
- Use the example.en.html order of extensions
- Always include a default mechanism - don't leave it unspecified what happens if the user's preferred language is not available

- Even if you use content negotiation, always display links to the alternative pages in a prominent position on all your pages (so that people needing to go there don't have to search for it)
- Use the name of the language in the language and script of the destination page as the link (and don't use flags)
- The link can be text in graphics (since it doesn't need translation)
- Include title attribute text in the a element that explains what the link is for the user of the current page (in the language and script of the current page)
- Mark up the link as per the following example to get the language tagging correct (English page linking to Swedish):
<a title="Swedish version" href="Overview.sv"><span lang="sv" xml:lang="sv">svenska</lang></a>

- Include a link element too marked up like this example going from English to Swedish:
<link title="svenska version" type="text/html" rel="alternate" hreflang="sv" href="Overview.sv" lang="sv" xml:lang="sv" />

See the example at http://www.w3.org/International/articles/serving-xhtml/

Comments, please,

RI


============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

W3C Internationalization:
http://www.w3.org/International/

Received on Monday, 21 June 2004 09:47:36 UTC