Multilingual site development

Quintagroup has recently faced the task of developing multilingual site. It was the case with Offshore Company. Initially it was created in English, but now out task was to make it multilingual: English-Russian. To fulfil this task we used LinguaPlone product, the tool that help to manage and maintain multilingual content. It was done quite successfully, but still some problem emerged.
Multilingual site can be organized in different ways, what we chose is:
English version was put into the root of the site - http://www.offshorecompany.com/
then we create a folder 'ru' - a Russian version of  the site - http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru
In 'ru' folder the content was translated but the shortnames remained the same as in English version.

The difficulties that appeared were:

• when a root Folder was translated with LinguaPlone, the translated version was automatically put into the root. What we had to do was to cut the translated version and to paste it into 'Ru' folder. Than the problem with shortnames emerged. Shortnames were generated automatically on the basis of their titles. And with every Folder, Page and Form mailer this problem remained - we had to rename all the shortnames to make them the same as in the root.
  e.g.  http://www.offshorecompany.com/company/                       
          http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru/company/   
• when a Page from initially translated folder was translated, it was put into the corresponding translated folder in 'Ru', so the only difficulty with it was to rename the shortname for every page.
  e.g.  http://www.offshorecompany.com/company/strategy.asp                       
          http://www.offshorecompany.com/ru/company/strategy.asp   
• PloneFormMailers had to be copied, as they failed to be translated at once. That's why we doubled them, and only after that it became possible to translate form mailers.

Meta tags on translated pages were changed with the help of  Plone SEO product. _____
tags: Content Manager|  Lviv|  Offshore Company|  Olha Pelishok|  Plone|  Plone SEO|  PloneFormMailer|  Quintagroup