Compatibility:

WebSite X5 Evo and Pro

Internet breaks down all national and international boundaries. If you think your website may be visited by people from other countries, or if you want to extend your market by selling your products/services abroad, you should definitely bring your website to the next level and make it available in more languages.


Initial assessments

Before editing your project you should take some time to reflect about some important aspects:

  • How many and which languages?

It would be just perfect to make a website available in many different languages, but we must be realistic at this stage: every language requires an  investment in time, budget and resources. You should therefore carefully evaluate what really is important for you, according to your target and your goals. You could start with one or two languages, and then possibly add more on the go.

  • DIY  or professional translations?
    The decision you take about this aspect is really delicate: try to find right compromise between quality and budget. You can do it all yourself, and therefore invest very little or no money, rely on an affordable freelance translator or on a less cheap specialized agency. Whatever your decision, always make sure the quality of the translation is good: a poorly-made translation not only conveys wrong information, but it also put the credibility of your website at risk.
  • Tranlsations or localizations?
    Specifically if you rely on your website for your job or for selling your products, you should never settle with a simple literal translation of your contents. Each country has its own cultural peculiarities: with a good localization, the target text conveys the same message of the source text by adapting it to the characteristics of the target readers.


How to prepare your projects for the different languages

To make things clearer, let's assume you have a website in English and that you want to make it available in German and Portuguese too. You have already taken all the decisions about the kind of translation you want, and your target texts are now ready. That's what you need to do:

  • Open your English website project  and verify on Step 1 - Website Settings > General Information if the Content Language is correctly set on EN-English.
  • Check if the project is complete as far as the graphic layout and the contents are concerned, then click on Home > Open project to open the Edit an existing Project window, select the same project again and create two copies by using the Duplicate button: you will need one for the project in German and the other for the project in Portuguese.
  • Use the Rename button to give each project a recognizable name, so you easily find them.
  • Open the German website project and, on General Information, set DE-German as Content Language. Now edit the project so to substitute all the contents, such as texts and images, with their German version.
  • Open the Portuguese website project and repeat the same steps.


Now you can set up the necessary commands to enable your visitors to choose the language the website should be displayed in. There are essentially two ways of connecting the projects in the different languages among each other. If you are working with the Pro edition, though, you can rely on a third way too. You can:


Of course, the last step implies that the projects in the three different languages are published online. There are some rules to be followed, so that everything works properly. See: How to publish projects for a multi-language website.


#tip - Automatic texts.  There are some text which the program automatically inserts, such as the labels for the contact form or for the e-commerce shopping cart. To learn how to edit them, see: How to manage the languages for the texts automatically created by the program.


Notes on the language management

WebSite X5 generates all the HTML files for the website pages in UTF-8 Code for all characters (Unicode Transformation Format, 8 bit).


Thanks to the UTF-8, you can make your website available in any language, including those which use non-Latin alphabets, such as Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 


Not only can you have websites in different languages, but you can also have text in different languages in the same website, and all characters will be displayed correctly: you can have an extract in Russian with its translation next to it in English.