Well, my approach was perhaps simplistic: my blog is already utf-8 so that was one plus. But the approach worked but then I decided to go bilingual on the reader side only: Since I was using WordPress, it was relatively simple. If you are using one theme, and Chinese and English should look similar… Get one theme as you like it by editing.
Make a copy of the theme in a new folder in wp-content/themes/theme-2. Then simply edit the theme-2 so that each of the important comments is in Chinese. ( I think I got most of that covered!)
Since you can do this in WordPress Admin, it’s not particularly fussy. Just ‘search’ for the English, paste the Chinese in place of the English, hit ‘submit’ and voila!
The subtlety though was in using the theme switcher plugin. I decided to embed the theme switching code in the URL, then create a new page (for the top bar). Enter the page title and using the redirection plugin set the page as redirecting to the English version with the theme code appended at the end thus.
Code:http://www.yoursite.com/?wptheme=English
I conveniently named my themes English and Chinese! Of course, like me, you’ll also have to create pages in Chinese and pages in English … right now, thought, the theme switch isn’t permanent, (it used to be… not sure why? could be a new plugin I’m using). I would like the theme switch to be permanent, and it should work.
You’ll notice that some categories are only in the English Blog, that some posts cover all languages, … that’s because our audiences are mixed languages. Also, you’ll notice that the feeds are run of site, so no specific language segregation there. It works for us, but there are some other compromises, too. So it’s not a perfect solution.
For more details, you can read the original post here.
Kenneth