7th of August 2013
2. How to build a multilingual website
The case for translated web pages. Example: Facebook in French
After Facebook launched a French language interface in February of 2008, the
site’s popularity skyrocketed, growing 443 percent (…) to an estimated 12
Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/17/facebook-is-big-in-france/
Non-English-speaking user increasing
2002 – 65% and 80% of all websites
were in English
2007 – 45% of all websites were in
End of 2009 the percentage of
English-speaking users dropped to
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, October
"Five years from now the internet
will be dominated by Chinese
Main items to consider:
Centralized vs. regional website setup
Length and height of text and text labels in pages, navigation menus and
Handling of dynamic content
Handling of product names
Google Webmaster Guideline and Search Engine Optimization
Character set and language display
2. Building a multilingual website
Key questions to ask early on in the project:
Centralized vs. regional?
What is the default or source language?
How are the navigation menus set up?
Static (normal .html pages) vs. dynamic (news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook)
Are all static pages translated into all languages?
Different legal requirements per country?
Local content to suit local needs and tastes?
Multimedia content (audio, video)?
2.1 Centralized vs. regional
Web design must support multiple languages
Language toggle button
Art work and design must be culturally acceptable in all the countries being
Example: show people from different ethnic backgrounds if target
audience is in USA
Avoid art work, colours and designs that are offensive or considered unlucky.
Get local feedback.
Possibility to invert web design for languages that read from right to left such
Support browser „Zoom In“ functionality to increase text size of website
2.2 Web design
Consider length and height of text and text labels in pages, navigation menus
Web design must be dynamic, length of a navigation menu entry or label
should not be fixed
Example: French tends to be longer than English.
Example: Chinese and Korean and Japanese characters have a minimum
height requirement for labels and forms.
2.2 Web design
Some languages have many variants:
US English vs UK English
Swiss French, French French and Canadian French.
Chinese simple vs Chinese traditional
Portugal vs Brazilian Portuguese
This depends on the main markets addressed, but can become very
complicated in a centralized setup
Example from CLS website: Fax vs Télécopieur
2.3 Language variants
Translate product names? Get local advice!
Example from CLS website:
China-based translators recommended localizing product names such as
„CLS Machine Translation “ in Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simple
For large set of corporate terms CLS can build a corporate language dictionary,
2.4 Handling of product names
In what format are translations carried out? Word.docs ? Directly within the
CMS? HTML? XML?
Example from CLS website: set up the default language English, completed all
the content for this and then exported the files to XML and then started the
translation process in parallel.
Benefit: avoided a lot of small errors such as wrong links because we used
XML instead of Cut and Paste from Word, this is esp. true for Asian languages
where you don't understand any of the characters.
2.5 Translation process
Follow Google guidelines to build effective web
Keyword research – identify 5 to 12 keywords
that people may enter to find a service or
Develop interesting and useful content around
Incorporate keywords intelligently and in a
Write in short sentences
Use well-structured text with headings
Write for people, not search engines
Besides technical requirements, quality and frequency of content is important for
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
CLS offers writing, editing and translation services for multilingual website
2.6 Google Webmaster Guideline and Search Engine Optimization
Character set and language display:
UTF-8 : always use this character set
Display language based on browser language settings
Spanish browser – Spanish version of website
Chinese Trad browser – Chinese Trad version of website
Test multilingual content management systems early
2.7 Technical aspects
Test website in all major browsers: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/environments/
2.8 Browser testing
Good reasons why you need a multilingual website today rather than later:
Shift away from English internet users
Cost Effective Marketing Tool
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CLS Communication AG
Tel. +41 44 206 68 68
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