Hi Guys, not sure where this should go so here it is...

I am looking to provide one of my sites in different languages using google translate, for purposes of

SEO

  and maintaining site structure etc I would like the other languages to be accessed via subdomain

I.e. fr.domain.com or it.domain.com

However I cannot for the life of me get it working. I have tried something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fr.domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=fr&sl=en&u=http://domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Except I get an error such as:
"Unable to determine IP address from host name for domain.com"

Anyone have any ideas? I believe its a problem due to DNS resolution on the server, but my host don't seem to understand the problem...

I never thought of doing it that way.  So, I tried that with one of my sites and all the links on
my pages are relative links to google translate; no matter what i click, I get another google URL, duh.

anyways, have you created the subdomain fr.yourdomain.com ?
if so, the .htaccess file should be in the fr's folder.

Is that how you have it set up?

I tried to just catch [in the main htaccess].
Perhaps I need to physically create each subdomain, have it point to a subfolder, then attempt to use some

PHP

  scripting goodness to parse it all.

Bah it shouldnt be this hard... mind you it would be worth it if i got X times more traffic simply for localised searches!! Woop

And yeah google tends to hijack the links, looks like I might have to parse them out so it looks all nice on the site and so forth.

Did you have any success, traffic / rankings wise, with different languages?

Yah, that's the DNS problem that you mentioned.  You can not do wildcard subdomains with
just .htaccess.

I would create the subdomain, point it to it's own folder, then put an htaccess like you had
in that folder.  and i would do that for each language.







last year, but the sites got banned and i never bothered again.