Technical appraisal of localization projects

Once you have decided that your website must include other languages, there are some technical questions your website translation services provider will need to know before getting down to work.

1. Is your website built with a CMS?

If so, which one: user-friendly Weebly, multi-feature Wix, design-oriented Squarespace, versatile WordPress, popular Joomla or the all-powerful but complex Drupal? The answers to these two questions will determine the translation strategy to follow.

Managing multilingual content without a CMS will be time-consuming and requires more IT resources, since every update will have to be done by IT professionals. A CMS will speed things up, and anyone in the company will be able to update content, so this is fast becoming the preferred option for most companies.

Some CMS come with built-in multilingual capabilities, while others rely on third-party plugins or modules to provide them with all sorts of new features, from importing and exporting content or speeding up your website to managing multilingual versions or helping you to get more leads. For the most popular systems, a great many number of plugins are available (sometimes in the tens of thousands), and choosing the ones that are better suited to your purpose will be an important decision that should not be taken lightly.

1. Is the architecture of your website appropriate?

If you created your website a few years ago with only your language and country in mind, its structure may not be well suited to the multilingual challenge it now faces and some restructuring might be needed. Domain and URL definition will play an important role and how you structure your website will have a direct impact on your SEO and geotargeting strategy. There are basically four options:

-    Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as site.ie for Ireland or site.jp for Japan

-    Generic top level domains (gTLDs, like site.com or site.org) with subdomains (e.g. de.site.com)

-    Generic top level domains with subfolders (e.g. site.com/de)

-    URL parameters (site.com?loc=de, site.com?country=france)

Each option has its pros and cons (cost, server location, infrastructure needs, level of maintenance, country recognition by users, etc.), which will have to be carefully weighed up against your business needs.

1. Will your page layout hold together when translated into other languages?

Text expansion/contraction:

When content is translated into other languages it will naturally expand or shrink in size. For example, if you translate your website from German into English, it will contract around 10 to 20% in volume (although, paradoxically, the word count will be higher). If you translate your website into English from another language, text volume will be reduced in most cases, although not all.

When this happens, titles may exceed margins, text boxes may overlap, chart legends may run into the graphs and the overall aspect of the page may change, so you should design the layout to accommodate this.

Encoding issues:

Before you can start localizing your content to meet the language and cultural needs of your target market, you will have to analyse your website’s source code to detect and solve any issues that could prevent that process; that is, you will have to internationalize your website.

Internationalization (sometimes abbreviated as i18n) is the step prior to localization (l10n), and it basically means preparing your programming code so it doesn’t have to be modified with every translation into a new language. This typically involves:

-    removing the translatable strings of the program and keeping them in separate resource files, which can then be translated into the different languages. The integrity of the source code is thus preserved. Only translatable strings are moved around with each translation, and the program will work correctly in all languages.

-    formatting of numbers, dates, time, units, currency, etc. is made language-independent: the format is removed from the source code, stored separately for each language and called into the program again when needed for a specific language.

-    adjusting other alphabet-specific processes, like sorting and providing support for non-Roman characters and right-to-left, bidirectional or vertical text.

I18n is always done in Unicode standard, which can be coupled with UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32 encodings, depending on the technical specifications of your website.

1. Is your website rich in extratextual and multimedia content?

The Internet has forever changed the way we obtain information and interact with the world. We now have fast access to information, we think fast and make decisions on the spot. However, this need for immediacy has also dramatically reduced our attention span. According to a study carried out by Microsoft, in the era of smartphones and social media the attention span of the average adult has dropped from twelve to eight seconds since the year 2000 and is now shorter than that of a goldfish (which is nine seconds). In these conditions, people are far more likely to engage with your website if it contains images, videos or presentations that break up the monotony of plain text.

Multimedia content may include:

 -    Graphics

-    Forms

-    Images

-    Slideshows

-    Videos

-    PDFs

-    Adobe® Flash® content

When translating your website, each of these elements will need to be treated differently:

-    Graphs and charts will have to be opened and localized with the apps that were used to create them.

-    Character length issues will have to be anticipated when translating forms.

-    If images have embedded text, they will have to be processed with graphic tools and recreated in each translation into a new language.

Embedded text should be used sparsely (if at all) since it has several disadvantages: 

- it can’t be scaled, so it won’t respond to the browser’s font-scaling options

- it will not add to your SEO strategy, since it can’t be read by search engines

- it’s not searchable, so it won’t be found by visitors searching for that term on your pages

- it will not respond well to zooming, since it’s not vectorised, and finally

- it cannot be translated or updated directly because it’s not text but an image

-    Videos will have to be voiced-over, dubbed or subtitled with specific tools.

-    PDFs will have to undergo DTP before translation if the original files they came from are not available.

-    Flash® content will also have to be localized with special tools. 

1. Does it include news repositories or blog posts?

While most website owners will probably decide that these elements do not require translation, some businesses might want these elements translated, and a different approach may be needed for this task. 

Needless to say, you will also want your website to look as good on a mobile device as it does on your PC, so you will need to take the necessary steps to make your website mobile-friendly.

The process of globalising your website will no doubt present technical challenges and will require thoughtful planning within the many milestones involved. However, when you come to think of it, the goal is surprisingly simple and could be expressed in an almost haiku-like fashion: 

• Your company will be able to talk to all of its customers in their own language.
• This process will be invisible to you.
• All the content you create will be replicated across all languages and platforms.
• And this will be done effortlessly and seamlessly.
• You need only concentrate on your marketing efforts, and forget about linguistic issues.
• The language factor will disappear from your mind because when you speak in your mother tongue you will be speaking to the whole world in their own language without even noticing.