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« Is my website/blog compatible with Flavius? »
« How can I design it to get the best possible result? »
Those are very legitimate questions that every website operator might ask before dashing into the adventure of localization, a process that the Flavius platform simplifies a great deal. In a nutshell, Flavius is compatible with well-built content sites.
A ‘content’ website?
When we refer to a content site, we mean a non e-commerce website. In its My Global Website, Flavius does not manage the server side which is essential in e-commerce sites. For those who are interested in those features, it is better to try My Multilingual Files which allow you to translate only the file resources of your commerce application.
A ‘well built’ website?
What we call a well-built Web site is comprehensive of the majority of cases. However, some particular points can lead to an incomplete localization.
- Sites that span on more than one domain: We cannot take your site in account if your site ‘mydomain.com’ includes a sub-domain similar to ‘video.mydomain.com’, or to ‘home.mydomain.com’, The same problem can happen in the case of .com and .net usage at the same time.
- Sites using a large number of Javascript links or loading a lot of content in AJAX: these sites are difficult to duplicate, and certain parts of your site cannot be translated. If you are not able to use HTML links, another option is to translate your site with My Multilingual Files.
- Sites based on Flash or that have text within images: it is not possible for us to translate image or animation content (for example, if you use an image for a menu item, the visitor will not see the localized version). The Flash animations will also stay in the source language. This does not prevent your visitors from reading all the text around it, however!
- Sites in which the robots.txt file is too restrictive: robots.txt files allow site operators to block robots that want to fetch its content. If you want Flavius to process your website properly, temporarily deactivate this feature.
A recurring issue that we have addressed is multilingual site processing. Thanks to the integration of a language detection module in the platform, it is now possible to detect the language of pages and to translate only those that are relevant in a totally automated way. For example, if your site is composed of pages in French and English, but the source language of your job is French, then the pages in English will be ignored.
One last thing…
You probably know that the same sentence can be longer or shorter according to the language in which it is written; but you might not know that Chinese is up to 70 % more compact than English!
Without going to such extremes,, the best practice regarding the localization of web pages stipulates that we have to make additional space in the design of a page, about 30 % for the more expansive languages than the one who served to write the initial version. If, in spite of all your precautions, the layout turned out incorrectly, we have a tool that allows you to spot the issues and to fix them.
