Tips To Develop A Multilingual Web Site To Work
If you are living in a country where English isn't the primary language, then you may like to develop your website to offer content in the language of your own country. There are millions of websites on the Internet that are all in English but there are billions of people on the earth that speak in a different language and are not familiar with English. However, most of the Internet users are basically familiar with English and could use the Internet but there are many subjects that are hard to understand for those people whom their language is not English.
One example is websites related to pharmaceutics. There are tons of very difficult to understand phrases in the content. The other example is educational websites that basically should provide content in the local language not English. You may have many clients and business partners that wish to read your sales copy and product information in their own language. So, having a website that provides the content in a language rather than English is necessary for you. Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Dutch, French and many other languages are examples of common languages on the Internet.
For you to start a multilingual website, it is vital to consider some tips before starting to design and develop your websites:
1- The Code Page
The best code page that you should choose for your web pages is Unicode. Unicode is a kind of numeric presentation of characters that is two bytes and so can contain up to 65535 characters to show. There are no currently spoken languages that have more than 65,535 characters. So, by using Unicode, you are able to show all characters of your language.
2- Tools For Development
For creating web pages in Unicode format, you should have a tool to be able to type in your language. One of the tools that are widely used by web developers is Microsoft Front Page. If this tool is installed on Windows XP then you have the most powerful set of software to create Unicode documents. FrontPage is a WISYWIG tool for creating web pages and you can easily choose the language of your web page in options of the page and appropriate HTML tags would be automatically inserted in the code.
3- Nature of the Language
If your language is Right-To-Left like many of Asian and Middle East languages, for example, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, you should tune your operating system to be able to switch from Left-To-Right to Right-To-Left typing method to be able to type from Right and from Left. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, you can configure your system for multiple languages and keyboards, each of them having different kind of input methods. For example, you can add Farsi as the second language of your Windows and then switch from English to Farsi by pressing a combination of keys and start typing in Farsi. Also switching from RTL to LTR would be possible by another key combination.
4- Navigation and Design Considerations
Some languages force you to apply some changes in the design and navigation of your website. For example, if you have a vertical menu bar, you may put it in the left of your pages for English pages and in the right for Arabic pages because Arabic is a RTL language and people are used to start reading pages from right to left. However this is not a rule, but it is better to consider it in designing pages. Another issue is the entrance page. If your website is in two languages, you may add an entrance page that makes client choose the navigation language of your website. This page could be a very nice graphical page with two options for choosing desired language and then enters the web site in that language.
In some cases, you may consider one language as the base and eliminate
entrance page. In this case, you assume most of the visitors may use a language that is dominant and they enter automatically the web pages of your web site that are in that language. However, visitors would see a small icon in web pages that lets them switch to the other language. Other method is to use IP2Country services that can find the country of the visitor from its IP address and by adding some simple dynamic code to your pages, you would be able to switch to the language of the visitor. However, this method is not %100 accurate and you should expect some margin of error in recognizing the country of the visitor.
5- Font Face Considerations
When you are creating your web pages in a language other than English, you would be limited in using font faces. There are a few font faces in windows that are installed automatically and can show multilingual characters. If you like your visitors view your pages correct without any need to install fonts, you have to use those minor number of multilingual fonts. One of the best font faces is Tahoma that is somehow easy to read and contains all Unicode characters also is included in Windows.
6- Database Driven Web Sites
If your web site is a database driven and you have forms that clients may fill and be posted to database, there would be lots of very technical issues that you should consider to be able to collect and retrieve data in different languages.
7- Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a major issue for multilingual web sites and you should be aware that not necessarily all major search engines and directories handle multilingual web pages perfectly and your web site may not be listed in many of them. Google is a search engine that indexes multilingual web pages too. There are some issues and difficulties but it works well enough for your web site to be indexed in your language.
8- Domain Name
Despite the language of your web site, the domain name should be in English. At this time, having a domain name in another language presents another set of issues and the way multilingual domain names are handled is still a new issue in development. There are some solutions but are not yet set perfectly. So, I suggest you forget those solutions and choose an English name for your web site.
9- Web Server And Hosting
Major web servers, like Microsoft IIS and Apache both support multilingual web pages, but I strongly recommend you to ask the hosting company for this issue and make yourself sure that there wont be problems for your web pages to be served by the hosting company.
10- Name Web Site Files
Never use Unicode characters in the name of your web pages. However your operating system, like Windows, lets your choose the file names in Unicode characters but be %100 sure that theses web pages would have serious difficulties both server side and client side. In many cases, you won't be able even to upload your web pages to your host space and client's browsers also won't be able to recognize the name of page and would generate error. This is true for name of images, flash files, scripts and other pages. Just use English names.
I have tried to cover some of the major issues in developing multilingual web sites. There are of course, many details I did not explore. Multilingual sites require some experience and I am confident you will discover several new issues that are not included in this article as you work with your own sites.
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
About the Author
David Bell
Advertising research and development center
# 1 Internet Marketing Agency -Online Advertising Agency
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