ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

11.2. Design

The first thing you need to decide when localizing a site is whether you want to localize only static content (menus, links, copyright notices, usage agreement, titles and descriptions for pages, tables, fields, buttons, and other controls) or whether you want to provide a translation for everything, including articles, poll questions, product listings, and so on. Let me state up front that adding support for complete localization would be very difficult at this stage of development, as it would require a complete rework of the database design, the DAL, the BLL, and the UI. It's something that should be planned very early, during the initial site design and the foundations development. Complete localization in a single web site is not a common requirement: You normally wouldn't translate every article on the site, forums, polls, and newsletters, but rather, only those that have a special appeal to one country or language-specific audience. You may also want to present information differently for different languages—changing something in the site's layout, for example. Because of this, most sites that want to be fully localized "simply" provide multiple copies of their pages under different subdomains or folders, one copy for each language. For example, there could be www.contoso.com/en and www.contoso.com/it or http://en.contoso.com/ and http://it.contoso.com/. Each copy of the site would target an independent database that only contains data for that specific language. ...