Wordpress site, built in English, for Chinese readers

February 5, 2013 9:46 AM

Tell me what you know about building a Wordpress-based site in English, but with Chinese-language content. Or any other language, really, if it applies to this situation.

The site will be built by English-speaking designers and developers for an English speaking company that wants a small Chinese-language Wordpress site for their burgeoning Chinese market.

The CMS will be in English, and Chinese language content will be input directly into the CMS by the translator. The reason we're not doing this as a static build is that the content will change on a regular basis.

All the information I've found so far is about using plugins to automatically provide translation - that doesn't apply because we will be using a professional translator. I just want to know about things like

-design considerations
-Chinese character support
-I know Wordpress.org is banned in China - does that mean there will be problems at all with building a site with a Wordpress framework?
-Anything else I've forgotten?

posted by cilantro to computers & internet (3 answers total)

There's some really useful info in the Wordpress Codex on language support. Essentially, it's built to do exactly what you're looking for.

In terms of blocking, from what I understand this is done at the domain level and there would be no real way to "block" an HTML page on an external host generated by Wordpress.
posted by Rodrigo Lamaitre at 9:51 AM on February 5

Oh yeah, any examples of good-looking, image-heavy Chinese language sites would be great - Wordpress examples, especially, but anything is great.
posted by cilantro at 9:51 AM on February 5

I'm not sure what you think a Chinese language CMS would need beyond... a regular Wordpress installation. Wordpress has a lot of internationalization support, but that applies more for turning the CMS back-end into a different language. (A lot of themes also come with built-in internationalization, but again, that applies to the admin panel more than the front end, which you say will be in English.)

Chinese character support will be determined by the viewer's browser, so if your viewers are Chinese, you are likely going to be okay.

I'm not sure what you mean by "design considerations". If you mean "Chinese viewers will expect sites to look differently than American viewers", well...they won't, really. For example:

Chinese Facebook
Chinese Twitter
Chinese Google / Affiliate Wikipedia
Chinese News Portal

As for the Wordpress sites - as long as it's self-hosted on a server accessible from China and the domain isn't blocked, you're fine. You can't block the specific code block used to generate a website. It would be like blocking PHP and Javascript. But I would make sure that all of your external resources are accessible internally - a lot of theme developers will host stuff on Google's code CDN (for jQuery, for example) and that will wreak havoc. I had trouble accessing Gmail half the time on the mainland.

Here's an example of a Wordpress site built for a Chinese audience.
posted by Phire at 10:12 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]