Translate Site English and French in ColdFusion

Question

I am on this project where we need to allow users from French speaking countries to be able to view the webpages and surf the site in French. I am kind of lost on the best appraoch to get this done. Please any one has an idea of where to start?
The site is working now in English and there is a databse (MS SQL Server 2005) set up also in English.
How do I translate the site to French.
The database does it have an in-built translator that will do this translation for us?
Thanks

Answer 1

Well it's certainly no small task you're undertaking there, but there are a couple of ways of doing it as far as I know.
The first is to store all the phrases in all languages in an XML file, then pull the correct outputs depending on the current language. For example: (pseudo, obv)
<xml>
    <dict lang="EN-US">
        <phrase id="1" value="Hello there. Welcome!" />
        <phrase id="2" value="Sorry to see you go, goodbye!" />
    </dict>
    <dict lang="FR">
        <phrase id="1" value="Bonjour. Bienvenue!" />
        <phrase id="2" value="Ah, le chat des ami. Au revoir!" />   
    </dict>
    <dict lang="ES">
        <phrase id="1" value="Hola! Bienvenido!" />
        <phrase id="2" value="Lo siento, pero tu hermana es muy guapa!" />   
    </dict>
</xml>
You then load each language into a structure in the APPLICATION scope (call it APPLICATION.LANG), then pretty much everywhere in your code you need to output something you'd instead do:
<cfoutput>#APPLICATION.LANG[SESSION.language].phrase1#</cfoutput>
Or similar.
The other approach is similar, but involves having the phrases saved in database tables and doing a similar thing.
And sadly no, you'll struggle to find anything that can reliably translate for you - certainly not a database.
O
PS languages are not my strong point, as you may have noticed.