Multilanguage shop - Best practice?

Question

We have a shop that will be launched in 50 countries and in 30 languages. What is the best practice for a multilanguage shop?

Each shop will use its own domain but will be based on the same backend.

What we need:

• Translation of texts in the theme
• Translation of the content category and product pages

We will use webtranslateit.com as translation tool which can export to a wide variety of formats. One of them being PHP arrays.

Is there any ready to use extentions that does this or do we have to come up with our own solution? Any suggestions or links that demonstrates how we best can do this will gladly be received.

Answer 1

Translation of texts in the theme These are CSV files with in column 1 the english (origional) string and in the second the translated string so if possible export it like that.

Translation of the content category and product pages For the products CSV or XML will probably be the easiest. What you will need is the the product ID or SKU, the translated values and the store or website ID the translation applies to. From there you can write an import script that processes it which shouldn't be too hard.

Translations for any dropdown or multiselect attributes might be a bit harder. You will need to add these options in the attribute values and then mapping them to the product. Again this is possible but be a bit more difficult to tackle.

For product data there are a lot of extension to import it. All of these accept several different formats and should help you import the data easily.

1. Native Magento dataflow
2. Aoe Importer
3. H&O importer

For Categories I'm not to sure what you can use best. I normally use a custom script. An example of that you can find on this Github page. The script imports category tries but can also be adapted to import the data per store or website.

Answer 2

Serpyre is correct and I don't understand why his answer is voted down. We have 4 tlds .com/.de/.nl/.fr and all content and products are translated manually. We are a manufacturer and sell B2C with Magento worldwide and the manual translation has certainly proved to be worth it. Our business has grown substantially.

If you are serious about your business and the service for your customers I would first of all choose an approach that you can control. 30 languages sounds to me like overkill unless you are NIKE.com and even then I would debate it. My advice would be max 4 commonly used languages if you have the team and knowledge to back it up otherwise just use .com and build a solid online presence and service level form there.

Using automated translation is very unwise in my opinion.