WEBEXPEDITION18 Never Stop The Exploring

The world is becoming a smaller place, but thankfully it’s not becoming a more homogenous place. More and more people are going online to communicate and do business, but this doesn’t mean that everyone’s speaking English – it may be the ‘mother tongue’ of the internet, but only 22% of web surfers are native English speakers, and the number of internet users in Asia outstrips those in North America and Europe put together.

In this environment, if you want to be a truly ‘global’ and competitive website, you need to think beyond a monolingual and monocultural audience and reach out to everyone out there in cyberspace – especially if you’re in the business of selling goods and services, since studies have shown that 85% of consumers won’t buy from a site if they can’t read about the product in their own native language (Common Sense Advisory, 2006).

Other studies also show that people’s cultural backgrounds influence the ways in which they process information, as well as their preferences in terms of web design. For instance, web users from ‘High Context’ eastern cultures have been shown to draw more meaning from the context of a website rather than the subject, while at the other end web users from ‘Low Context’ western cultures (especially Germany and Scandinavia) draw their meaning from what’s actually said on the page – this means that your imagery and colour schemes will be far more important for communicating meaning for a Chinese or Indian site, while for a German site it’s best to go for minimalism and concisely presented information.

Different cultures have different needs in terms of content, as well – cultural references don’t always carry across countries. For instance, if your navigation links are based upon a cultural in-joke like gifs of the characters from ‘Friends’, then you’re going to confuse of whole lot of visitors to your site.

There are a few simple rules and tricks that you can keep in mind when designing a website to make it more accessible across languages and cultures, whether you intend to build a series of fully localised websites for a range of target markets, or just to make your site accessible to speakers of multiple languages via automated translation tools like Google Translate.

Design

You need a design that’s going to be flexible enough to switch easily between languages with different character sizes and script directions, but also consistent in its branding across a range of localised sites. There’s no firm or fast overall rule, but pinching some ideas from the big global players with dozens of local sites – like Sony, McDonalds, Google and Coca Cola – can’t hurt.

For instance, take a look at Coke’s Japanese site in comparison to their Swedish site. The Swedish site has just three text boxes and a small amount of Flash animation, it’s relatively minimal and to the point, while the Japanese site features dense and colourful images – Coke have obviously done their research and figured out that what Swedes look for in a website, and what the Japanese look for, are two very different things.

There are some simple tricks that can be employed for a website framework that’s easily adaptable between different cultures. Symmetry is a good idea, so that you don’t have to redesign your entire site every time you need to switch between a left-to-right and right-to-left language. It’s also useful to have your navigation bar horizontal rather than vertical, for the same reason.

Tools

Use cascading style sheets for your design, because CSS allows you to keep your content separate from your design, making it much easier to switch the language of your text in a text box or to switch images without having to redesign the entirety of the page.

Also, use Unicode UTF-8 as your character encoder, as it covers every character in over 90 different scripts, and it’s supported by all the major browsers and has been adopted by the big guns like Apple, Microsoft and IBM. Thanks to Unicode you’ll never be caught out without the right character.

Avoid too much Flash content – Flash files slow down your load times and keywords embedded in Flash files are hidden from search engine spiders, both of which will directly affect your Google ranking.

Content

Most important of all, make sure that your content is relevant to its audience. If you’re going for one single site with the option of automated translation, make sure your content is written in plain and simple language – it may hamper your creativity to ban flowery metaphors and fifty-cent words (a perfect example of a phrase that won’t translate well), but it will make your site much more comprehensible.

If you’re building a series of localised sites, it’s important not only to have your content translated by a native in-country speaker of each language, but also copy-written by one – languages are such finely nuanced and ever changing beasts that the fine blend of tone and cultural reference that marks exceptional copy writing can only ever be achieved by a writer who is immersed in the culture they are writing for.

By keeping your multilingual and multicultural audiences in mind before you start designing your site, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort in the near future, when the non-English internet inevitably exceeds the English-language internet.

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Authored by Christian Arno

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translation agency and localisation specialists Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 120 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over thirty million words for businesses in every industry sector and their projected turnover for 2010 is £6.3m.