The Olympics, Multilingual Web Sites and Content Management Systems

Get in the Game 

The issue of international Web sites has been broadly discussed recently because of the Olympics. The purpose of this article is to examine the importance and functions of multilingual Web sites.

The multilingual Web site is still in its early stages, but it will inevitably become part and parcel of an Internet presence. It is a trend that your company should be part of, whether you operate a small company looking to take off and establish a foot-hold in foreign lands, a mid-sized firm looking for new markets or a large-scale global enterprise.

Hundreds of other global businesses such as Apple, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, and Coca-Cola are using multilingual Web site marketing to get in contact with many more people from different language groups around the planet. These people might include partners, suppliers and, of course, potential customers! The Internet has made it so much easier to establish your brand on a global scale.

Gaining the ability to communicate with new international audiences in their own language will boost sales and create awareness of your brand, service or product. With every language added to a Web site, there is the potential for an increase of more than 100% in sales.

How People Search

English speakers will soon be a minority when it comes to Internet use. When searching on the Internet, most people will use their first language. In fact, only 1% of users search in other languages at all.

Think of the markets that you miss. Multilingual Web site marketing campaigns are central to modern day businesses. In the European market, for example, using an English Web site, you can expect to communicate with about 16% of the population. However, if you have a German, Spanish, Italian and French Web site, then you can touch 74.1% of the population!

For many cultures, there is an issue of trust when buying over the Internet. Offering them a language alternative allows the customers to feel secure. You put your visitors in a 'cultural comfort zone' as they are able to navigate, understand and interact with the Web site in their own language.

Search engines lead people to your site. In countries such as China, Japan and France, Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the default search engines. Homegrown search engines are emerging and they are proving successful because they work in native languages and are focused on their users' habits and needs. Many of the key search engines, especially Google, are developing the capacity to run searches in foreign languages. Having pages of your site available in those languages provides greater potential for your site being picked up in searches.

A multilingual Web site demonstrates that you think, work and deal internationally. If your competitors are not in this game – you gain advantage. A multilingual Web site demonstrates that you are thinking about the customers' needs.

The Challenge

It is obvious that in a multilingual, multinational business environment, Web sites should not ignore their customers' native language needs. Many Web sites seem to be quite oblivious to their users' specific needs.

The common problem is that businesses do not notice this gap until someone fills in a comment form and his name suddenly displays funny characters (e.g., question marks, squares or other characters). Now you have to think about it!

At times, translations can be just awful and content can vary in thoroughness from language to language. In some cases, an automatic translation tool will produce plain gibberish. There tends to be a random nature to mixing languages within pages.

The main problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalization, Localization, character encodings, Unicode and other terms connected with multilingualism.

Best Practices

Layout: Poorly planned sites can be confusing if the navigation differs from site to site. The best solution is to have editorial staff for each language. Some of the basic information can be analogous in all languages. When you select a different language, you will be pointed to the exact page in that language (i.e., each page is mapped to its sister pages). If there is no corresponding page available, you will be pointed to the homepage of the selected language where you receive an overview of all contents available in that language. If you have more limited resources, consider a page called “Other Languages”. Give a central overview over all pages available in foreign languages. Show what is there and what is not. It is important to give the user feedback if a page is not available in another language and to offer the choice of continuing to the homepage of the selected language or returning to the original page.

Adding content: Adding text to a Web site in an unfamiliar language can be tricky. The best solution is for the translators to enter the translated text into your Web site. This is possible with WYSIWYG capabilities offered by some CMS systems. This avoids the need for translators or multilingual Web developers that have some knowledge of such things as HTML and CSS.

Text in some languages takes up more space. German and Russian text takes more space than English. Chinese and Korean take up less space. In some languages, such as Thai and Lao, there are no spaces between words. These differences can be a challenge for certain sections of Web sites (particularly menus) that have a fixed width. Shorter translations might be required. Ensure that your CMS has full WYSIWYG and UTF-8 capabilities.

Style sheets: For languages that are written from right to left, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, page layout should be flipped. Some images may need altering and adjustments to the style sheets and some page elements will also be needed.

Font sizes: Chinese, Korean and Arabic are difficult to read at font sizes that are perfectly legible for languages like English, French and Russian. Using separate style sheets is a solution to this problem.

Linking: On multilingual Web sites, linking between languages is challenging. We suggest listing all the translations available on your homepage. Link to the translation on every page of your site as not all visitors will enter your site through the homepage. List the languages using either their native names or their names in the original language of the Web site. Do not use flags and/or country names. Flags are country-specific, while languages are not.

Maintaining your Web site: Keeping all the translations of your site up-to-date is a real challenge. Employ in-house translators if possible. Consider saving up portions of text that need translating and send them to your translators once a month. If possible, employ Web editors who speak each of the languages. Remember to explain to your translators the kind of audience your Web site is aimed at so that they can adjust the register of their translations appropriately.

Tone and localization: Beyond language, consider the issue of localization – including formality of language, currencies, weights and measures, public holidays, cultural sensitivities, gender roles and geographic examples. The original text of your Web site might be written in informal language, but this could be inappropriate in some of your translations, or vice versa.

Interactions: When you are contacted online in foreign languages, you should employ people with both language and sales skills, or train people with the relevant languages in sales. Alternatively, you can use your translation service to translate the queries and respond to them with the guidance of your internal staff.

Internationalization and Localization.

Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting software for a specific region or language.

Here is how it's done. A character set describes the characters for a language or region. The character encoding describes how characters of a given character set are represented by a code. Three major codes are ASCII, ISO-8859 and UTF-8.

ASCII is a simple 7-bit character encoding. It can represent the Latin lower and uppercase letters, the ten digits, some punctuation marks, and some control characters. This displays texts in English. The ISO-8859 standard describes 15 different 8-bit character sets.

Unicode (also called UCS for Universal Character Set) aims at containing all characters ever used in every culture in the world. Each character has a unique number or is produced by combining several other characters. The standard has existed since 1991 and is constantly under development. Unicode Version 5.0 (from June 2006) contains approximately 99,000 characters. The characters are distributed on different code pages.

UTF-8 is one possible character encoding for Unicode. With UTF-8, it is possible to encode every character contained in Unicode. Encoded characters range from one to six bytes. The advantage is that the first 128 characters are compatible with those from ASCII.

UTF-8 is therefore the answer to most encoding problems on Web sites. All operating systems, browsers, editors and other software should be able to handle UTF-8 character encoding. With this encoding we can happily mix Greek and Japanese characters on one page.

Olympic Glory and Web Globalization

Given the attention to China because of the Olympics, Chinese localization of your site should be an important part of your Web globalization. This localization will give your company a position in the world's largest, and highest potentiality, market. Work to create a true international environment for your customers and potential customers from all over the world.

As we advance our international Web development practice we are standardizing on Bitrix Site Manager. Bitrix has a convenient and comprehensive solution for multilingual Web development and possesses a flexible architecture and powerful system functions. It also provides the powerful Web 2.0 tools that are essential to success on the Web.