[TYPO3] Making multi-lingual sites

[Tomas Mrozek]

> What I mean is, is the content going to get rendered correctly when it's in russian or chinese or french?

Yes. However, if some content is outputed by an extension, it depends on 
how well the extension handles it.

 > And saved correctly in the database?

Yes, if you stick to utf-8.

> Can anyone give any links to useful resources for TYPO3 in relation to 
> multiple languages? Or advice?

I've built a couple of multilingual websites and TYPO3 handles it quite 
well. Backend is pretty multilingual (if something is not translated, 
you can always translate it yourself) and frontend has no problems 
either (if setup correctly).

There are some glitches, though:

* Websites are usually not translated by customers themselves but by 
professional translators. And this could be cumbersome. I know at least 
about one extension that helps to handle translation of the content 
(t3_locmanager). However, you have to think about how to handle it when 
the site is already built. If someone changes the content of the default 
language, the translations should be changed as well. This means you 
need something that easies this process: notifies responsible person 
that some default content has changed and re-translation is needed. 
t3_locmanager doesn't handle it and I don't know about any other tool.

* If other language versions are edited by people who don't understand 
the default language (ie. Chinese branch of the company edits the 
Chinese page versions of default Hungarian pages) they might be a bit 
confused because the page tree always shows the page names in default 
language (unless you decide to use multiple-tree concept). The only 
thing that helps them in such a case is the Info module that can display 
all pages and their translations.

Tomas Mrozek