Support » Fixing WordPress » How to build a site in both English and Arabic??

  • I am building a WP2.9.2 site that my client wants expressed in both English and Arabic. Right now it’s in English. He is fluent in both languages so he will make the translation. He rejects the idea of a translator plugin (and we do not even know if one exists) on the reasonable grounds that computer translations are prone to serious and ludicrous results. His topics are political, cultural and religious, thus requiring great care with nuance and phrasing that no computer of today can provide.

    My question deals with the issue of site structure. I am looking for suggestions.

    At the moment, the best approach I can think is is to build a pair of matching sites in sister sub-domains (enlish.website.com and arabic.website.com).

    However, I suspect that this approach may not work. I am aware there is an arabic-specific WP version. Probably for good reason, among them the different fonts, left to right, and the needs for language consistency in all the site controls, navigation, etc.

    So perhaps a better approach might be to register two domains and install them on my server, one using the basic WP (in english), plus the other using the arabic version of WP, with links between them.

    Is that the best way to go? Are there any hosting issues?

    Comment, feedback?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Hi, I am facing a similar issue, did you get any results? any tips?

    cheers

    Some tips would really be appreciated, specially regarding the RTL template transition.

    Thank you.

    This is what I did. I wanted the platform to be english wordpress but I wanted to write in both arabic and english. The arabic was coming out as question marks.

    I read this form questions and answers which helped
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/multi-lingual-posts-come-up-as-question-marks

    as written by “jackreichert”

    “Two things to check:

    First that under Settings->Reading Encoding is set to UTF-8

    if that doesn’t do the trick, edit your wp-config.php file find the line:

    define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
    and change it to:
    define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ”);

    after doing that I had to reimport the xml of posts, but it worked properly.”

    The code for english-arabic I got it from here
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_set

    this is what I did:
    under Settings->Reading Encoding is set to ISO 8859-6

    if that doesn’t do the trick, edit your wp-config.php file find the line:

    define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
    and change it to:
    define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘ISO 8859-6’);

    This is my website test came out:
    http://www.lafemmejeddah.com

    I hope this helps you 🙂

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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