internationalization in the server or in the browser

Question

How would you go with i18ning a rich web application?

Would you internationalize in the server or in the browser. What are your experiences with this?

Answer 1

Do it on the server side, or (among other things) your site won't show up internationalized to search engines. This would make it very hard for international users to find your site at all.

Answer 2

You want to handle it on the server side. The browser can't alter encoding types which you will ultimately need to do to handle internationalization.

Answer 3

Would you internationalize in the server or in the browser.

Yes.

Certainly you'll need to work on the server-side. If you have client-side JavaScript that is creating user-visible text you'll also need to localise that, which will generally be a separate task. eg. Have the server side write a <script src> pointing at a different script file depending on the language, with the script containing a lookup of text strings which can then be consulted by the logic scripts.