One of my greatest pet peeves is websites that have a bilingual option that redirects to a different page than the one you are currently looking at.
That is, you find a website that claims to have content in English and in German. You find a particular page on that site in German and you want to see it in English, so you click the language selection button on the site. Do you get the English version of the page? No. You get the homepage. And then good luck finding that specific page in the language you want, especially if you surfed in from Google.
This is terribly annoying because it's one way that I occasionally do research for translation. Finding webpages that are "live" uses of the subject matter I'm working with is a great help in confirming word choice and understanding things in a functional context. If I'm translating something about construction equipment, it's useful to look up certain pages on the manufacturer's website, for example, and see how they use certain terms. It would be even more helpful to switch directly between languages, but alas, it is rarely so convenient.
Rest assured, when my new website goes live, the language selection option will switch you to the other language without sending you away from the content you're looking at. It's the least I can do after all my complaining.
Posted by steve at March 6, 2004 11:44 AMI hear you!
Here's what I usually do in these circumstances:
1. I click on "English".
2. I am back on the homepage, in English this time.
3. I move my mouse cursor over various links to determine the page structure of the English website.
4. In most cases, I find that the URL for the German page differs from the English one only in having an extra "/en", "/eng", "/english" or "/uk".
5. I go back to the German page and add the appropriate folder tag to the URL of the German page.
6. This works quite well 95% of the time.
Posted by: Werner George Patels at March 8, 2004 01:24 AMI will make sure to keep you honest on your claim. I am totally guilty of doing the same... when I had the second iteration of my personal website, I had a link to Spanish, and the content was totally different. My new project is going to be a (All about Colombia page.) But it will be developed in English, and then translated into Spanish and maybe other languages... but I agree if you claim to have languages on your site, it should be ALL content.
Posted by: Logtar at March 15, 2004 11:04 AM