Managing multi-lingual website when you don't know the language

Internationalization and localization are some ways to test the water in various regions, to see which market you fit in best.

I wonder if any of you has any experience in a multi-lingual web (with contents of different language) maintenance, moderation, etc. Do you hire developers with the requirement to speak different language, or you have translators in your office?

Thanks.

There are many companies dedicated for translations, some of them have API's, some new start-ups help you do it yourself, some of them have in-place community members which you can hire or call-to-participate freely.

I used to manually write translation interfaces, but it's impossible to get translators to translate using these manual interfaces because usually translators are very non-technical (more non-technical than a 6 year old kid), they can only translate from excel etc. So you would be better of using a translator company which has a translation API.

I am currently working on multilingual application for smartphones as well as webiste supporting this app. If you have descent developers they shouldn't have problems developing multilingual application/website at all. When asked that question myself, my developers told me, that everything you have to do in order to add new language, is to make list of all text lines in one document and then simply add translations (assuming code is descently written).

Last thing I would request from developer is speaking multiple languages. It's tough enough to find descent developer, who is good at writing code and you don't want him to think about anything else but programming.

I think you should outsource translations somehow, either try checking through your international connections or find translators on freelancer websites. I don't know how wide your web is, but after all there usualy isn't that much text to be translated, so hiring a full time translator is usualy a bad option.

However if you are going to look for freelance translators, try to agree on keeping their contact information as you might need them for future minor tasks.