I have a web application that I’m working on that has always been in English. We are working on going international and want to start adding support for other languages, primarily French and Spanish for now. We are going to use human translations and need to have support for both the content on the pages as well as some content being pulled from a database.
I have no idea where to start so I was hoping that someone knows of some resources that I can use to help get started with this as far as best practices, standards, etc.
In .Net you can use resource files for the translations. See this tutorial:
http://afana.me/post/aspnet-mvc-internationalization.aspx
The database side is a little different in that there are a number of different approaches. Some like to have language specific tables, some just add language specific fields (ie. c_title, c_title_fr, c_title_es…). I developed a Java application once that had a class called LocalizableDescriptionItem, which was inherited by every object that required localization. There was a language key field for each record with a foreign key to a binding table to link each item to the default (English) version. This way, each translation had it’s own record and could be pulled separately if needed.