Is it possible to create INTERNATIONAL permalinks?

Question

i was wondering how you deal with permalinks on international sites. By permalink i mean some link which is unique and human readable.

E.g. for english phrases its no problem e.g. /product/some-title/

but what do you do if the product title is in e.g chinese language?? how do you deal with this problem?

i am implementing an international site and one requirement is to have human readable URLs. Thanks for every comment

Answer 1

Characters outside the ISO Latin-1 set are not permitted in URLs according to this spec, so Chinese strings would be out immediately.

Where the product name can be localised, you can use urls like <DOMAIN>/<LANGUAGE>/DIR/<PRODUCT_TRANSLATED>, e.g.:

http://www.example.com/en/products/cat/
http://www.example.com/fr/products/chat/

accompanied by a mod_rewrite rule to the effect of:

RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/product/([a-z]+)? product_lookup.php?lang=$1&product=$2

For the first example above, this rule will call product_lookup.php?lang=en&product=cat. Inside this script is where you would access the internal translation engine (from the lang parameter, en in this case) to do the same translation you do on the user-facing side to translate, say, "Chat" on the French page, "Cat" on the English, etc.

Using an external translation API would be a good idea, but tricky to get a reliable one which works correctly in your business domain. Google have opened up a translation API, but it currently only supports a limited number of languages.

• English <=> Arabic
• English <=> Chinese
• English <=> Russian

Answer 2

Take a look at Wikipedia. They use national characters in URLs.

For example, Russian home page URL is: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Заглавная_страница. The browser transparently encodes all non-ASCII characters and replaces them by their codes when sending URL to the server. But on the web page all URLs are human-readable.

So you don't need to do anything special -- just put your product names into URLs as is. The webserver should be able to decode them for your application automatically.