Translate categories with the language file?

[wabugi]

I'm currently thinking about making my website multilingual. Until now every kind of translation had it's dark sides.

It is possible to translate every kind of text with the language files. And I really like this feature. But I have some questions about how this feature works. Before I write too much, I just start to explain what I would like to do.

Let`s say I create an extra field with the value 'car'. And now instead of unsing car I use variable names like {$smarty.const.LANG_VALUE_CAR}. In the language files I could now easily set the different translated words for this variable. But as you know the website will always display {$smarty.const.LANG_VALUE_CAR} and not the words from the language files. Is there a way to change that? Let the script get the value as variable and then displace it with the language file value. Would be great. I could translate every single extra file and value for every language.

[Lhotch]

The problem is extra fields, category names etc etc are stored in the database. It stores what you type and displays it to site visitors.

You create a field category called "Car" thats whats in database, thats whats pulled out and thats whats displayed to the client.

On that same not, your site visitors will enter an ad on your site and what they enter for ad details will be in what ever language they speak and thats what your clients will see. So regardless of what you do with category and extra field names the ad data itself will be untranslated.

[wabugi]

Yes you're right. Was just an idea to make some of the values of extra fields translated. For drop down fields for example. But even if I could do this, it would mean that in the worst case I have mixed ads in my database. And I don't think that anyone would like to see that.

I have to think about that again. But I'm now quite sure that I will keep the categorys, fields and ads in english and will only use different languages for menus and help-files.

Thanks for your fast answers btw.