Urls - translate or not?

asked 2010-04-29 18:31:27 -0600

I've asked a similar question before and then deleted it. Now it becomes relevant again - is this a good idea to translate urls or not? How about query parameters?

Do all modern browsers display unicode characters in the URL bar correctly?

Could you advice?

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

1

answered 2010-04-30 00:56:35 -0600

Pekka
600 ●22 ●29 ●37

updated 2010-04-30 02:25:52 -0600

As to the basic idea of translating URLs I'd say yes, definitely translate them. It's a beautiful little detail.

It gets tough with the Unicode, though, I think. While all modern browsers can, to my knowledge, deal effortlessly with UTF-8 characters in URLs, it is possible that a translated URL shows up in many other places:

In text files
Copy+pasted into E-Mails and other forms of communication
As a link on an external web page that has different encoding
Read by client libraries that can't deal with UTF-8 characters (see for example here)
Viewed in non-standard browsers

and so on. From what I can see looking around on SO, this is possible, but shaky.

For latin-based languages, I'd say translate them, but use ASCII characters only. That's how I would do it in the german translation, for one. Every language has their own, safe rules how to deal with that (in German, ä becomes ae, in Finnish, ä becomes a, and so on).

It's obviously not a solution for the rest of the world, and it would be nice to be able to have cyrillic, chinese, japanese, korean...... question texts in the URL. Hmm.

Update: I've posted a question on SO with good results. Apparently, percent-encoded URLs will work fine, and displayed correctly in the browser. Evgeny, what do you think?

edit flag offensive delete link

Comments

Yes - translated urls look much better! Practically though translation of urls should be done by programmers not translators IMO, b/c urls are keys to content and they must be unique. Non-technical translators might miss this, so I've disabled transation of urls on this multilingual site. Thanks!