International marketers go to extraordinary lengths to create user-friendly, high-quality, culturally aware websites as they understand this is best for business.
They know that by creating an exceptional user experience they are more likely to increase sales, retain customers, and get a better ROI.
If you are planning to generate a multi-lingual website, read on for advice on best practice…
1. Brand Consistency
Brand consistency will ensure all visitors to your site enjoy the same user experience no matter where they are in the world, or the language they speak.
Promoting the same brand concepts, message, and emotions will stimulate the same response and actions in your customers.
By utilising a professional translation and localisation company you can successfully modify your multi-lingual design to fit each market, audience and culture, while remaining consistent to your company branding and ethos.
The use of global templates will offer consistent brand expression across all your sites, so if a French customer lands on your English site they will still recognise your brand, and know they are in the right place.
Global template also allow for effective localisation, and issues such as, text expansion, regional dialect, culture variations, and desktop or mobile device usage.
They can also enable regional marketing teams to operate unique campaigns, simplify web management, reduce development expenses, while minimising the likelihood of errors, coding problems, and maintenance.
Flexible templates should be able to cope with any language variations, including left-to-right and right-to-left text such as in English and Arabic making them ideal for use across the globe.
2. Global Gateway Design
Your global template will allow you to create multi-lingual websites but while designing the template pay special attention to the global gateway that will direct users to the specific localised version they require.
Usually these are found either at the top or bottom of multi-lingual websites. For instance, Amazon lists different languages and countries at the bottom of their site, while some others use a dedicated page for redirection to the right country.
Be aware that in some countries there are multiple languages in use, so using a flag to represent each language or country can be problematic for users. Instead, try simply listing each language in their own tongue. For example; English, Francais, Italiano, and so on.
3. Localise Formats for Ease of Purchase and Use
Remember, when selling abroad you will have to consider changes in currency, laws around imports and exports, shipping prices, and formats for dates, addresses and so on.
Even selling solely in Europe can cause variations in currency as the UK uses the GBP (pound), Poland uses the Zloty, and Hungary uses the Forint, while many other countries within the EU use the Euro.
Customers who can buy in their own language, and their own currency, are far more inclined to make a purchase than those who cannot.
Once a customer has decided to make a purchase they will need to enter their details. Address formats vary from region to region so ensure your site can cope with these differences.
Dates, time zones, postal addresses, currency, and phone numbers can all be potential danger areas for confusion if they aren’t localised. Sales can fall through if a customer can’t input their information due to poorly localised sites.
4. Images, Logos, Icons and Colour
Localising your content for each audience doesn’t just involve a change in language and some formatting variations.
Any image, logo, colour, photograph, symbol, or graphic has the potential to offend if used in the wrong context.
What is appropriate in one culture can be seen as derogatory, inflammatory, or inappropriate in another. For instance, blue is often seen as a colour that is calming and is linked to nature, however, in Iran it is the colour of mourning.
A professional localisation company, with regional experts, can advise you on the safe use of colour, images and graphics depending upon your target location and avoid any potential offence being caused to users of your site.
5. Localised-ready Graphics
Graphics can cause issues with location appropriateness and also, embedded text.
Embedded text complicates the process by preventing easy access for translation and may lead to a complete rebuild of graphic files.
Instead, web developers should overlay text onto graphics within the HTML, if this provides the quality and control that you require.
Remember, that for SEO purposes, search engine ‘crawlers’ can’t ‘read’ text which is embedded in images and will serve no purpose in increasing your SEO ratings.
Check with your language service provider which program is best to use before you begin as some such as, Adobe PDF files, can be more difficult to translate.
6. Flexible User-interface
When translating from English, some languages can expand by up to 35%. This can cause issues with design and formatting so advance planning with a specialist language designer is crucial.
Site menus, call-to-action buttons, text content, and other elements, can all be influenced by text expansion or contraction.
It is best practice to have a multi-lingual desktop publishing localisation expert to guide you through the design process and/or edit your UI to avoid any related problems.
Finally, be conscious that this list highlights only a few of the potential issues that can arise from the creation of a multi-lingual website. Working with a specialist language service provider who can advise, guide, and assess cultural and linguistic nuance of you target audience will guarantee an effortless, cost-effective and rewarding process.
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