Do you want your web pages to be available in more than one language? As well as cumbersome buttons to send visitors to different pages, depending on which language they'd like, our Apache web server can automatically take them to pages in their preferred language by using configuration settings from their web browser.

The way this works is that the user will configure their browser with a list of languages in the preferred order. eg, French, Italian, English. If you then provide pages in German, Italian and Spanish, they will be given the Italian pages. If you provided French pages as well, they'd be given the French pages in preference to the Italian ones.

How it works

  • Original text (English) name your files in English .html.en
  • Computer translation (French) name your files in French .html.fr
  • Computer translation (German) name your files in German .html.de
  • Computer translation (Italian) name your files in Italian .html.it
  • Computer translation (Spanish) name your files in Spanish .html.el
  • Computer translation (Portuguese) name your files in Portuguese .html.pt

    Then link to the page in question without any language .xx extension - just link to it with a normal .html extension (of course such a file should not exist!) and, as if by magic, the file in the appropriate language will be spat out. eg,

  • Computer translation (Automatic - Negotiated by browser)

    Language translation

    The above example pages were translated by computer using the the AltaVista Babelfish forms interface. It's easy!

    To compare the computer translation with a real (human!) translation of the English original, here are some versions of the above document, helpfully contributed by the readers of the European Bisexuals mailing list.

  • Human translation (Italian)
  • Human translation (Spanish)
  • Human translation (French)

    Go to Features on bi.org