Building a Multilingual Web Service Using ACS

by Jeff Davis (davis@arsdigita.com), John Lowry (lowry@arsdigita.com), Henry Minsky (hqm@ai.mit.edu)

Submitted on: 2000-07-24
Last updated: 2000-07-24

ArsDigita : ArsDigita Systems Journal : One article

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Imagine you are a web publisher with a very big idea. You want your idea to be accessible to users in different parts of the world in whatever language they speak. The first part of this goal is easy. In fact, nothing is required of the publisher. Web sites can already be accessed from almost any part of the world. The second part is more difficult. At first glance, the solution seems simply a matter of translating content into each language the site supports. But what happens when the pages of a site are dynamically-generated by a computer program? Very few web publishers have succesfully implemented such a site.

You should read this article if your idea is so compelling that you are not daunted by the obstacles that have held back all but the most ambitious publishers. We describe a solution for building a multilingual web site in which all the pages are dynamically-generated. We use the ACS toolkit to build the site, but we provide sufficient information that non-ACS users can adapt our solutions.

Contents

1. Big Picture

   Very few organizations have successfully implemented a multilingual site. We give an overview of the extreme organizational and technological challenges that are involved.

2. Language issues

   This section describes how to identify a user's language preference and how to send output to the user in that language. We also discuss how to organize the process of translating content into different languages.

3. Localization

   Locales are the set of language and cultural rules which are used to format dates, numbers, and monetary amounts. This section describes an API that can be used to read and write localized data.

4. Character encodings

   The default web character set is ISO Latin 1, which can encode most characters in Western European languages. This section discusses how to handle characters that cannot be encoded in ISO Latin 1. It includes a sidebar on character entity references in HTML files.

5. Timezones

   This section discusses why we need to store timezone information. It describes how to convert dates from local time to Universal Time and vice versa.

Demo site

If you want to see our code working, go to our demonstration of a multilingual site, which supports four languages: English, German, French, and Spanish. Each page on the site is dynamically generated and can be viewed in any of the four supported languages.

You may be disappointed by the quality of translation if you are a native speaker of one of these languages. That is because we have used translation software rather than human translators to create the non-English content. You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to switch to a different language.

Code status

A set of patches for serving web pages in multiple character encodings using the ACS is available from http://imode.arsdigita.com/i18n/. In a short while, we will release the code that was used to implement the language, localization and timezone parts of the demo site.

Credits

This article is based on the recent work on multilingual web sites. The team was led by Jeff Davis and its members included Marc Anderson, Ashok Argent-Katwala, John Lowry, Henry Minsky, Sebastian Skracic, and Kai Wu.

More information

ACS toolkit http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/
Demonstration multilingual web site http://multilingual.arsdigita.com/
Patches to the ACS for serving web pages in multiple character encodings http://imode.arsdigita.com/i18n/
W3C Internationalization and Localization http://www.w3.org/International/Overview.html

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Reader's Comments

I just want to point out the the language features listed here are available for ACS 4.x in the acs-lang package available in the repository:

ACS Localization Utilities

I spent some time before I figured that out.

Jacob

-- Jacob Williams, May 23, 2001