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17.05.05

Blogging in multiple languages using Movable Type

When I first had a homepage nine years ago, I wrote all content and HTML by hand. Publishing in two languages at that time meant lots of copying and pasting. Later, I started to use SSI and then wrote myself a parser for multilingual content and Perl code, which is still active on my current homepage.

Given my fascination for the richness of human language, it was clear to me that when starting a blog, I don't want to settle for just using the current lingua franca, English. So I decided to find a solution that will allow me to publish both in German and English. That proved to be harder than I thought.

Upon receiving no replies in the Movable Type community forum, I wrote my own MT plugin that helps me write multilingual content. I can write an entry like this

<!de>Zuerst die deutsche Fassung, <!en>then some english<!> and this applies to all languages.

thus dividing up the content in several languages. These language markers are not really tags in an SGML/XHTML sense, as they cannot be nested (which is intentional). They can be used even in post titles or category names, so that most content can be multilingual.

To create the actual pages, I duplicated each template for each language so that I now have two index pages, two archive pages etc. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to create multiple files from one template yet. Another approach that I am still thinking about is to create only a single set of pages and use a post-processor to split up the content.

So far, the system works remarkably well, even without hacking MT (something I wanted to avoid). However, I still have problems with trackbacks -- currently, a trackback shows all the text, which can be a bit confusing.

Posted by crenz, 17.05.05 11:53

Trackback-Pings

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Kommentare

Im interested in this plugin...can I download it from you and try it out on my blog? Tony

Verfasst von: Tony um 22.08.05 18:28