本地化：子域、目录或域

Question

I'm about to embark of my first multilingual website and I'd like to get the opinion of everyone...

The site will be utilizing jQuery, so there's always the option of using a combination of jQuery and the Session to manage locale.

What method have you found to be the most cost effective and maintainable when it comes to localization for your website?

1) Sub-Domain (en., fr., es.)

2) Directory (domain.com/fr/)

3) Domain (domain.au, domain.it)

4) Session and JavaScript (and any particular plugins)

Keep in mind that I am not using the .NET platform so I will not be able to utilize their methods. Whatever the best process, whether it's PHP or ColdFusion, it should be the same concept.

Answer 1

This is kind of an opinion rather than a fact Q & A - so here's my opinion, be it right or wrong

I would go with subdomain (en.mysite.com / fr.mysite.com):

1. you control it fairly easily

2. search engines will love it (you may get a halo effect from indexing each)

3. keeps both relative and absolute pathing simple (unlike like directory)

4. after selection of locale (which i'll detail later), everything should 'just work'

5. session / javascript are unreliable at best, a nightmare of compliance at worse

And finally, there are no perceivable benefits (that i can immediately think of) of any of the other methods you're considering that do not also apply to subdomain - however, the others do lack some of the subdomain flexibility (like pathing).

Some people are answering how you are going about chosing the proper locale of a visitor, such as sniffing the browser language. That is a different question, there's a number of ways to do that - I suggest to do them all, the trick (and your decision) is how to prioritize them. ex: browser language vs. ip origin vs. cookie vs. manual selection vs. etc - which takes precedence?

have fun, localization can be.....a task. =)

Answer 2

Here are some articles that may help you:

- Top 5 Tips for Multi-Lingual Website Success in 2011
- Good tips for website localization
- localization - best practices

The point in the first article is, if you use a country code top level domain (ccTLD) such as.au or.jp, it may be more friendly to the search engine in the local country, but it still depends on your need. Do you want to target the alternative language or the whole country . Another thing you also need to be aware of is that the cost for maintaining multiple sites such as in ccTLD is higher in comparison to use subdomain instead (www.site/au, www.site/es)..

hope that helps.

Answer 3

We, generally, use localization for detecting client's browser language. If browser's language is "FR", we're gonna populate all french language files from our language folders. Using separate to different sub-domains are different stories.