Unless they are description content for product pages, you don’t need to maintain them in my opinion.
If they are news, blogs, articles and tips, no need
@Guido
Well, if you’ve done it once, it takes less time to do it again, and if you can support it, it’s always worth it in my opinion.
Now if you can’t support it, even if you speak the extra languages, thats another issue.
For example currently I don’t have the time to update my blog in more than one language, namely english, mainly because I lack in terminology for russian and spanish and as such can’t properly support the other languages, and because any self respecting programmer speaks english anyway.
Although I think supporting all the other languages would be well worth it.
@Sega
In Spain everything involving entertainment or any serious business needs to be in both English, and Spanish.
While for Russian clients it needs to be in English, Spanish and Russian.
I don’t know how much it increases market sales, because I haven’t added any languages, I had the languages from day 1.
All I know is that all my clients demand to have more than one language.
While from the CMS side of things, I tried different solutions.
From having several input’s for every language in a form, to having optional translations,
then having each language have its own content, which is the only way for user edited websites, like a mini regional network within the site.
I am still unsure which is the best one, so I would like to hear people’s opinions of how to manage a multi-language website with fixed content, and social websites where the main text is within the UI (where gettext is probably the best solution).
By the way, has anyone here used gettext po files and had them translated by a professional?
But even if you could, would it be useful? Would it be worth it?
Sorry to interupt, but I’ve got to get my word in again! I think this depends on your market and goals. The trouble is one community who know Arabic should know English or Greek if they live here. Like I mentioned changing the dynamics of the country is not the goal.
At one point I was considering having Greek and English on my site.
But then I realized that if the Greeks here did not know English then they probably did not want a website, or even know what the Internet was for that matter.
So the easiest solution was to have a single language.
It’s understandable that there are countries like France, Germany, Spain, China, Japan which demand their native language and have a strong geographic spread on their language to reap the reward from specific language searches.
Cyprus has very close ties with Greece, I’ve just opened a question on Facebook on their preferred search engine and it appears to be Google.com. I don’t know how Google acts when you start typing Greek in Google.com, if it get’s the results from Google.gr, who knows. Most people here use Google.com. The only real benefit to using Google.de is that your results would be more streamlined for your market. But don’t your search results depend on your location anyway?
By the way, has anyone here used gettext po files and had them translated by a professional?
Never used anything like that. I did a quick search on it and it appears to be for programs rather than websites. Would this be something useful for a site?
Yes, it exists for websites too, it’s probably the fastest way to translate bits of text all over the site, and there are special programs to edit the translation files.
I’ve built a few multi language sites, of which two were pretty big. The clients from both websites wanted multi language because they sell products and want to reach a broader market than just the country I live in.
I think that’s the thing really; if you have something to sell, or something to say that could benefit more than just the country live in, and you have the means to translate and provide support in more than just one language then I think you should definitely do that.
I don’t think it eliminates the competition, and I don’t think that’s the goal; the goal is just to be able to talk to more people.
From my personal experience with those websites it really isn’t easy to get all the translations. Several websites I built with multi language support still have some missing translations, even though they have been online for a few years now. (It was up to the client to provide the translations by the way, not me).
All in all I think the idea -when done properly- is very good, but it’s not trivial, and I think not all clients realize that.
Ah, thought you meant the paid translation services of a human 
For me, yes my clients are local but I mean why limit ourselves? Shouldn’t we be pushing the boundaries and looking everywhere we can for clients or at least being open to the entire world? It’s hard not to believe that people aren’t already doing this? Definitely food for thought, I mean I can speak 4 different languages already but it’s certainly worth doing some research on whether it’s viable or worth improving in this field! :tup:
Are you really going to start that now? 
Well that’s definitely got me thinking, I understand what you’re saying, it gives me a different perspective actually :tup: I know there are no quick fixes and I certainly wouldn’t have the audacity to be as cheeky as that - it’s insulting to the visitors or community as you say! But yeah, I’ll check my stats with Google and see what I need to do, if anything! :tup:
You do!? 
Run Guido run, don’t look back
I strongly thing translation is a must these days. It is very difficult to find good translators acquainted with today’s technology and topics usually talked about in websites.
Betty- <snip/>
This really isn’t my thing. As,I’ve noticed most of the translator couldn’t translate the proper message one is trying to convey. Translator mostly translate word by word,worse letters by letters.
I do highly look up those people that are multilingual,It will truly help your business!
not so important since we have several translation tools around
So you’re saying the translation tools are good enough and we shouldn’t bother implementing multi language ourselves?
That’s seems like what the reply said but obviously it wasn’t that well thought out more of a ‘randomised comment’ regarding the title than actually reading the topic itself.
Having a multiple languages in a website is a great option as if we can see it globally people are really getting in to it and it also depends on your targeted market If your business is global you should have multiple languages.
Interesting, thanks…
We have multilingual web site and it is really cool. I thinks the clients realize that, bcs they understand their language…and that is important!
I just recently had a thought about this, which was: If the people are using google translate (since it is very common) for free, why pay up to a couple thound dollars to have your website translated?
Indeed, that is one of the questions. And if you’ve read the other posts, you’ll have seen that some think google translate is enough, and offers good enough quality. And others think that the quality isn’t good enough, especially for ecommerce sites.
So you think the quality is good enough? That translating your site in one (or more) other languages won’t make any difference from a sales point of view?
Yes, I use gettext on several sites.
One site has 9 different languages. We send the po files to the translators and they use poEdit to do the translations (we had to give them a short training about how it works, but it works a lot better than the industry-standard which is Excel 
)
Another site has English and Dutch as languages, we translate those ourselves.
Lastly, my CMS (fruml.com) uses gettext for the dashboard translations (currently English 100%, Dutch 2% and Russian 60%).
The largest problem I have with gettext is generating the pot and po files. Depending on the set up of your site, that can be quite tricky. You may also need to adapt your templating system to be able to use gettext, but that is generally quite trivial (depending on the template system you use).
At the end of the day, I find that using po files makes it a lot easier to manage the different languages you have on your website, plus the actual rendering of translated strings seems to be quite a bit faster 'cos the translated strings are stored in memory.
It’s true what you say but …
I would say that english is enough. If you want the forum in your language just translated for yourself. Sure it won’t be accurate … but you will get most of it just ok.
This because: when you gather people from all over the world … actually you can’t satisfy people.
And if some one comes into a car dealer store and ask for phone … this is the owner’s fault or the visitors fault?
I use Google translation to translate English news to German news and post them on my German blog. Not really good but good enough for SEO. It brings new organic search traffic and makes new sales.
We aren’t talking just forums here, but all kinds of sites.
And if some one comes into a car dealer store and ask for phone … this is the owner’s fault or the visitors fault?
But if the owner speaks english, and half of the people that enter the shop speak German, maybe he might start thinking about hiring a german speaking sales person?
This is a very good example.
My site is in English. My potential customers can read/understand basic English well but they may search by their own language (German) or use their local search engine (google.de). So my goal is to have my site rank well in local search engine or non-English keyword (I could not compete in English keyword).
Once visitors land on my site, the translation is no more needed.