How to translate website in another language?(ASP .NET , c#)
If you really need to translate your application, it's going to take a lot of hard, tedious work. There is no magic bullet.
The first thing you need to do is convert your plain text in your markup to asp:Localize controls. By using the Localize control, you can leave your existing <span> tags in place and just replace the text inside of them. There's really no way around this. Visual Studio's search and replace supports regular expression matching that may help you with this, or you can use Resharper (see below).
The first approach would be to download the open source shopping application nopCommerce and see how they handle their localization. They store their strings in a database and have a UI for editing languages. A similar approach may work well for you.
Alternatively, if you want to use Resource Files, there are two tools that I would recommend using in addition to Visual Studio: Resharper 5 (Localization Features screencast) and Zeta Resource Editor. These are the steps I would take to accomplish it using this method:
- Use the "Generate Local Resource" tool in visual studio for each page
- Use Resharper's "Move HTML to resource" on the text in your markup to make them into Localize controls.
- Use Resharper to search out any localizable strings in your code behind and move them to the resource file as well.
- Use the Globalization Rules of Code Analysis / FXCop to help find any additional problems you might face formatting numbers, dates, etc.
- Once all text is in the resx files, use Zeta Resource Editor to load up all of your resx files, add new languages, and export for translation (or auto translate if you're brave enough).
I've used this approach on a site translated into 8 languages (and growing) with dozens of pages (and growing). However, this is not a user-editable site; the pages are solely controlled by the programmers.