One of our major clients GFI Software has just gone live with three foreign language versions of their site built off the Cookie Jar platform.
The site now uses Cookie Jar to run in English, German, French and Spanish, with others to follow.
This blog post highlights a number of Cookie Jar features that have enabled the GFI project to be successful.
All Content Types Translated
Every element of content on the site has been translated: text, images, documents, meta tags and titles, SEO friendly vanity URLs, navigation elements.
Image 1: The EndPointSecurity article on the French Site; text, images, documents, navigation and meta tags translated
Flexible Translation Workflows
Normally translators log into the Cookie Jar website and translate content directly in the CMS. GFI chose to export all content as XML and pass this into a custom Trados workflow. Translated XML was imported back into Cookie Jar and published.
Tailoring Foreign Sites
Cookie Jar allows GFI to turn off (unpublish) pages or whole sections of the site for particular languages. This has been especially useful for phased deployment of website sections.
Defaulting Content to English
In other situations GFI choose to show pages in English where translations were not possible or unavailable.
Complete Control Over URLs
The language shown on the GFI site is determined by the URL domain. For example the French site http://www.gfsfrance.com/ and the Spanish http://www.gfihispana.com/. Cookie Jar can be alternatively configured to switch languages on a folder structure e.g. www.gfi.com/fr/ compared to www.gfi.com/es/.
Additionally Cookie Jar allows pages to have different "vanity" URLs for each language, producing superior search engine results and ranking.
