Hey guys,
I know I'm late on the debate/poll, but I never go to the forums...
So, here is my two cents:
Our company, based in Europe, is developing 50+ cmsms based websites a year. and more than 50% of those websites are multilingual. We are not talking about 2 languages but at least 5 or 6.
Ex:
http://www.exceptionalenergy.com/
http://www.europeunconventionalgas.org/
http://www.eufoa.org/
http://www.east-invest.eu/
So, doing multilanguages websites are a
requirement for us.
To those who says that more and more people are speaking english, this comment is non-sense. Professional businesses want to reach the largest audience possible, for one, and I don't think we can say to all the european countries: Learn English and go F. yourself. Just look at the Belgian problem about languages...
About the technical point of view, based on our experience:
1. We never used the MLE system. Why ? Because most of the time, our websites are asymmetrically translated. So our first level are the language and then sub-websites. The only lack of that is that when you switch from one language to another one, you go back to the homepage. But let's be honest: Once you have chosen your language for navigation, why would you like to switch?
2. We never used the Google translate. That's maybe good for personal websites or very small business ones, but for professional websites, we cannot do that. It would be ridiculous (imoo).
3. For templates translations, we use our module "I18n" which allows us to centralise all the small translations (didn't check other solutions, there weren't there when we've developed I18n...). It might be nice to have an integrated solution or for us to spend more time on the development of I18n with help of other developers.
Conclusion:
Even if many people need multilingual websites, there are so many incompatible ways of doing it that I would first create a working group to decide how it should be implemented and if it should be implemented at all rather than advertising on good existing solutions.
As I'm deep inside the language/localisation/internationalisation/translation problem, I would be happy to participate in such group.
Best regards,
JCC