please take a look at this website www wechsel-tents.de

my question is about the language used for this website

for any websites that are not in english, how is it possible to display the characters in a particular language as the standard keyword has no options to display certain characters of a foreign language for example = ä this character from the above website cannot be found on a standard keyboard

also the meta content type is charset=iso-8859-1 which would be used for a website whose language is in english

do people use any special software for this

or do people initially type the content in english and use tools like google translate http://translate.google.com and convert english text into a particular foreign language and then simply copy and paste this foreign letters into the html pages of these websites which do not have the language as english


if a website uses a cms then there are modules which will take care of changing the language automatically based on which language a user selects


however in a case like the website above which have the entire website created in a non english language and do not use any cms, how do people go about creating such websites in their html pages as the tags are the same like any normal html page, only the text is different


please advice.

thanks for your help

please also provide any links which have literature in this regard

Use a UTF character set instead.

if a website uses a cms then there are modules which will take care of changing the language automatically based on which language a user selects

Depends on the CMS.

BUT using a UTF character set covers many language posibilities

First the website you provide as a example does use a CMS.
You can use 'on-the-fly' translation tools but that's not a good idea to use because it will give a lot of weird translations so you end up with a lot of weird words and sentences.
Just let somebody write the text in the language you need and use the tip that chrishirst provided for the characters.

also the meta content type is charset=iso-8859-1 which would be used for a website whose language is in english

Huu ?
you can use it for french too, italian, spanish, italian, and nearly ever european languages.
The site you gave as an example have a ".de" extension.
Wonder what it' means?
DEutschland, also known as "Allemagne" in my country, or "Germany" in English.

So, it's not too far stretched to imagine that this site is in German, because it's hosted, created and geared toward Germany, isn't it ?

I would even say that given that near 80% of the students in Germany are following a university cursus, and given that US bases hare there for so long, English is a very prominent language in the country.
I know because sometimes, when I go in Germany, I'm better understood when I speak English than when I try to speak German.
But true, my German is crappy...

So it's probably that the site was designed in German, and translated to German.
Not the other way.

English characters can be exprimed in the basic ASCII table of 127 positions.
Some other languages, like French, have accentuated characters, and latin1 (iso8859-1) was at the time the designated code page to have those "é", "ä","ü" and such characters handled in a non multibyte way.

Then came unicode (utf-8, utf-16 and such) that are meant to by a multibyte expression of nearly every existing symbol on earth.

or do people initially type the content in english and use tools like google translate http://translate.google.com and convert english text into a particular foreign language and then simply copy and paste this foreign letters into the html pages of these websites which do not have the language as english

It might be a shock for you, but English is far from being the most spread language on this planet...


ahhhhh...
Sorry for the rant, it's not meant to be offensive.
Long day, with bad things one after the other.

Sorry off topic:

Originally Posted by tripy

I know because sometimes, when I go in Germany, I'm better understood when I speak English than when I try to speak German.
But true, my German is crappy...

But i seriously wonder which part of Germany you visit then, cause when i'm in Germany no one speaks a word English. 'nur Deutch' is what i hear all the time when i try to speak to a German in English.

But ok, back on topic.

But i seriously wonder which part of Germany you visit then, cause when i'm in Germany no one speaks a word English.

I usually go in the region of Mannheim, and it was here that I had to resort to English. My wife has family there.
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