Dumb question du jour...
Is there an easy way to make my website multilingual without doing complete makeovers for every page in several languages?
I'm building a site for our home which we would like to rent out for the duration of the 2010 winter olympics.
The site would be targeted to Europe and Asia and I do not speak either Asian or European ;-)
Love CoffeeCup!

The only answer I know is No. Do not make the mistake of using on-line (automated) translators to change entire web pages to other languages.

I would translate only the header of your page meaning what calls the attention like "House for rent for the duration of the 2010 winter olympics", "Maison à louer pendant les Jeux olympiques 2010", "Casa para el alquilere", etc. (this one I had AltaVista Babel Fish Translation do it for me. I don't know how it sounds but translation to French was terrible). I would think that a lot of people in Europe and Asia read English, if not, they could have their own computer do it for them.

Good Luck,
Lucie

As a European I would say that most most us can read at least some English. I agree with Cliff in his opinion about the on-line translations, and with Lucie about just translating the headers.

If needed, contact me (mail address in profile) for translating the headers into Norwegian or German (I don't have time for any more than the headers!). Maybe someone else reading this can do you a favour in translating into some other language

Inger, thanks for the offer!
I have plenty of friends to help with the translations, I was just hoping for a lazy man's way to get the job done.

I have been running a villa rental website for a friend in Spain for 18yrs and have been constantly improving (I hope) through that time as the web evolves. We have everything translated into English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish. I am coming to the opinion with browser giving online instant translation of a page that its not worth the effort.
Should I do it all in English and let the browsers do the work? I am interested in peoples views on this.

Hi Steve,

Yea I think almost all the browsers to my knowledge are offering translation. I would not create seperate websites for each, this could be a major cost saving to your clients too not having to update multiple versions of the website everytime there is a change.