The How-To Library

Translating a Website

Translating a Website

This article is a short guideline to translating Websites that are programmed with HTML or XHTML. If you don’t know the differences between HTML and XHTML don’t worry.

XHTML is basically the same as HTML except that it makes use of CSS – Cascading Style Sheets – to format HTML tags. CSS is another language to format HTML tags which extends the basic HTML tag repertoire.

Translating Websites is actually a rather simple task since its just the same as translating normal text except that this text is now placed between HTML tags.

Requirements for the Job

Basically all you need for translating a website is a Word or Text editor that is able to load HTML files. Today all common Word or Text editors can load HTML files. What they cannot do is display an HTML formatted site as it appears in the Internet.

If you want to see the HTML site as it looks in the Internet then you need an HTML Editor with a preview function. There are a lot of freeware HTML Editors with a preview function available in the Internet so you don’t need to buy one. Just google the Web for freeware HTML editors. I have listed a few I commonly use myself at the end of this article.

Translating an HTML File

As I said above, translating an HTML file is basically the same as translating a Word or text file except that the text to be translated is placed in between HTML tags.

Since HTML is used for formatting documents it offers a whole bunch of HTML tags that can be used to format text including headlines, paragraphs, lists, tables, bold, italic and underlined text. The following table shows how these tags are commonly used and how you have to translate text that appears in between them:

So as a rule of thumb, you only need to translate the text in between the HTML tags. This also goes for HTML tags that define links e.g. <a href="index.htm">Home</a>. In this case you only translate the text “Home” placed in between the <a> tag.

Note that you can only translate text of HTML tags that require a closing tag. The HTML tags mentioned above all require a closing tag. HTML tags that don’t require a closing tag usually don’t have text to be displayed i.g. the <img /> tag or the <br /> tag.

An exception is the table tag because you cannot place text in between the table tag.

The img tag is used to load images of a certain size and the <br /> tag is used to define a break – that is a return statement – after a line.

The following table shows HTML tags that can contain text and those that cannot.

HTML formatting versus programming

Basically if you need to translate a website you won't have to worry about other programming languages like PHP or XML. However, it is not unusual that HTML tags are nested in PHP functions or that HTML tags are generated on the fly using PHP or JavaScript.

In this case you have to be able to distuingish between pure HTML and the script language, i.g. JavaScript or PHP. If you have difficulty in detecting HTML tags, remember that HTML only uses Tags as mentioned in the examples above.

If you want to see, how a normal text, e.g. a Word document is formatted as HTML, then you can save a Word document as an HTML file and load this HTML file into an HTML editor. For a beginning you can start with a simple formatted document that contains only headlines and paragraphs.

Freeware HTML Editors and Tools

There are a loot of good and excellent freeware HTML editors available in the internet. If you only need an HTML editor with a preview function then you might check out Evrsoft 1stPage HTML Editor. This is a very easy to use and install HTML editor with a lot of features.

Another good HTML editor is PHP Designer 2007 personal edition. This editor also supports PHP and Java files.

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