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B2B Marketplace Multilingual Architecture

Overall Architecture

Figure 1 below shows the schematic architecture of the B2B Marketplace.

Figure 1: Schematic View of the B2B Marketplace Architecture

This architecture has been developed as a function of the necessities of the B2B Domain:

  • International B2B Domain:
    The website serves as an online application rather then as a marketing device. The clients are located in several countries, so that contents and transactions have to be presented in several languages syncronously. The GUI appearence has to be more functional and cost efficient than experience oriented.
  • Translation Workflow:
    Content such as news is changing frequently, so that comfortable maintenance and translation procedures were important. We decided to use a content management system (Infopark NPS) to implement the multilingual workflow for all static contents (web pages).
  • Language and Portal Specific Configuration:
    Apart from running in several languages simultaneously, the application has to serve several protals at the same time. This way "horizontal" transactions are possible, selling for example white DIN A4 paper across several industries.
  • Date, Time and Currency:
    Date, time and currency were not an issue of this application, because all clients are located in the same timezone in Europe (with the same time and date preferences). Also, we chose the Euro as the single common currency.
  • Localization Fallback Handling:
    The marketplace implements a simple fallback workflow by sending Email messages to an administrator in the case of missing translations.

Multilingual Architecture Details

Figure 2 below shows the simplified multilingual flow for the B2B Marketplace.

Figure 2: Schematic B2B Marketplace Class Diagram

Please note the different types of templates for HTML pages and for "components" (reusable pieces of code). The content of HTML pages is translated using explicit calls to the Translation-DB, while the design templates (which also contain localizable items) are chosen as a function of language and portal.

Static HTML pages such as news or site information are handled outside Figure 2 by the NPS content management system which implements its own translation workflow. Also, the page and component templates are handled this way.

Please contact us if you have doubts or questions.