Hola, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Ciao....well, you get the idea. Even just the word "hello" can be said so many different ways all around the world that it boggles the mind. More and more these days, people come to the web wanting to see things in their own language, going to web sites that support their dialect so that they don't have to bother with translators just to be able to read the daily news. And, according to this article from PHPGeek.com, today, only having a site in English (as phpgeek.com is right now unfortunately), can leave out as much as 60% of your audience who don't speak English. That percentage will only grow.

So, what do we need to do to make things easier for non-English speaking peoples of the world trying to view our site? Well, incorporate a translator, of course! And, this same PHPGeek.com article shows you how to make it all work. They help you install and incorporate the Sokkit translation engine into your site and make phrase-based translations for the content of your site.

It's a pretty cool little system, and, once the initial work is out of the way on it, then you should be all set to have it just parse away happily at anything that you can throw at it.

How many of you out there are non-English speaking visitors? I've never really been able to tell (I don't do reverse DNS lookups on the IPs that visit, so I don't know) from my log files - but it would be interesting to see how many out there would be interested in something like this for this site....

Thanks to J Wynia for the link...