System : Languages

How to manage multilingual versions of your dating site

Yanar avatar
Written by Yanar
Updated over a week ago
Targeting an international audience and want to support multiple languages on your dating site.

A multilingual site is a web app that is adapted for users from different countries. The presence of high-quality translated versions of the site indicates the high level of care for users. In addition, the ability to read the content of a web page in their native language is a powerful argument for users. Business owners who plan to reach a wide audience should start by translating the site into other languages ​​and take care of its accuracy. The more language versions a resource has, the more queries it ranks for in the search. A site with content in different languages ​​that meets SEO standards will be able to generate high traffic. One of the key SEO factors is User Experience. The user experience (UX or UE) is a measure of the effectiveness of a site based on the behavior of its visitors. The presence of different language versions has a positive effect on UX parameters, increasing the average duration of a visit (Session Duration) and reducing the bounce rate (Bounce Rate).

Dating Pro script's default language is English, the most common language version of any site. It ranks third in the world ranking after Spanish and Chinese in terms of the number of people who speak it. A website translated into the user's native language makes it possible to get new customers. Choosing the right niche for your project might be a success plan.

Internet users by language (according to Wikipedia):

Rank

Language

Internet users

percentage

1

English

1,186,451,052

25.9%

2

Chinese

888,453,068

19.4%

3

Spanish

363,684,593

7.9%

4

Arabic

237,418,349

5.2%

5

Indonesian / Malaysian

198,029,815

4.3%

6

Portuguese

171,750,818

3.7%

7

French

151,733,611

3.3%

8

Japanese

118,626,672

2.6%

9

Russian

116,353,942

2.5%

10

German

92,525,427

2.0%

1-10

Top 10 languages

3,525,027,347

76.9%

-

Others

1,060,551,371

23.1%

Total

4,585,578,718

100%

Most of the site text content can be edited in section Services > Customize your service > System > Languages in administration panel (/admin/languages/langs), except articles, terms and conditions, and other info pages which can be changed in Services > Customize your service > System > Info pages.

How to manage multilingual versions of your dating site

The language that is set as default opens in the user interface when the visitors access the site for the first time.

To create a new language, click ‘Add language’ button. You will be able to indicate name, code, and text direction of the new language version.

For the code, follow the ISO 639-1 guidelines.

You can change text direction for right-to-left scripts such for Adlam, Arabic, Hebrew, N'Ko, Syriac, and Thaana, and many other languages.

Click ‘Save’ to apply the changes. Strings of the default language (English as seen in the previous screenshot) will be copied into the new language (Arabic) in the database. The new language will be inactive so that you can do proper translation.

There are several ways to do the translation.

Option 1, copy the original text from the user mode:

Copy the original text from the user mode.

and paste it to the search bar of the Content > Languages > Pages (/admin/languages/pages):

Open Pages section and paste the original text into the search box.

or go to Services > Customize your service > System > Languages > Pages (/admin/languages/pages) and select each module from the drop-down menu:

How to manage multilingual versions of your dating site

Click ‘Edit string’ to open the editor.

How to manage multilingual versions of your dating site

Do not forget to save the changes.

Option 2, download all language files as an archive to do the translation offline or to order translation.

First of all, you will need to go to admin panel >Services > Customize your service > System > Modules management (/admin/start/mod_login). It will require login and password that you can collect from file public_html/application/config/install.php

Log in to Modules management to download language files for offline translation.

Once inside, go to Languages (/admin/install/langs) and click ‘Export’ to download the ZIP archive with the language files that you want to translate (Arabic).

Decompress the archive, then open lang_install > application > modules > module_name > langs > lang_code.
Example: lang_install > application > modules > ausers > langs > ar.

Inside you will find PHP files that actually contain the words and phrases. Make sure that you only translate what comes after = ” (marked bold in the example below), no need to translate anything else.

$install_lang[“admin_menu_main_items_ausers_item”] = “Administrators“;
$install_lang[“admin_menu_main_items_ausers_item_tooltip”] = “Site administrators“;

After you are done here, copy the application folder or its contents, whichever you find more convenient, onto your server and click update icon next to the translated language to apply the changes.

Go back to Services > Customize your service > System > Languages and activate the updated language here:

Having translated the language files, one need to activate the language in the admin panel.

Useful info:

1. /langs directory in the root directory contains languages settings for the installation.

2. Language files that are used during installation are kept in /application/modules/module_name/langs. Inside, among other files, you will find pages.php (page text) and ds.php (lists content). The rest of the files names speak for themselves (e.g. menu.php).


3. During installation, all languages data is added into database (pg_lang_ds, pg_lang_pages). pg_languages table contains information about all languages installed in the system.
It is possible to save languages files in PHP or XML files. In this case all installed languages will be kept in directory /application/languages/php or /application/languages/xml.


4. If you create a new language from administrator panel (as described above), the data will be only saved in the database.

5. In languages management section under Modules installation > Languages (/admin/install/langs) you will see a merged list of languages from /langs directory – every language that has been installed or can yet be installed – plus every language from the database.

Let’s say we have created a language from administrator panel. Now we want to download its files and import them into another Dating Pro based site. Click ‘Export’ to download the archive. Next, you upload the extracted files into destination server, then go back to Modules installation > Languages (/admin/install/langs) and install it. The same procedure applies to language files updates.

Visit Marketplace to find out the ways of creating multilingual versions of your dating site:

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