When you’re putting the time and effort into building a cutting-edge new website to promote yourself or your brand, you want to make sure that as many people can see and use it as possible, right? However, so often when businesses move into the online realm, they think only about their local market, those that speak their language, and ignore the possibilities that the web provides as a truly global medium.
Consider that 78% of all internet users are not native English speakers and 85% of all online consumers will not buy a product unless they can read about it in their own language (Internetworldstats.com); that’s a huge market out there that’s being ignored if you decide to stay monolingual with your website. In fact, global businesses are reportedly losing as much as $1.6 billion in profits every year by failing to localise their product information, according to research by business strategists Forrester Consulting.
So it’s safe to say that building a website that is designed to be multilingual and to appeal to a range of cultural backgrounds is a wise financial decision – indeed, the Localisation Industry Standards Association found that every dollar invested in website localisation yielded a $25 return in 2007.
But how exactly do you go about creating a website for languages and cultures you know nothing about? Read on for the essential tips.
Domains
Your first step is to identify which specific foreign markets you want to target (for instance, China, India, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, etc) and then create separate Top Level Domains for each country, so you’ve got www.buymystuff.cn, www.buymystuff.in, etc. Not only will having a TLD for each individual market help with your image as a reliable local brand, it’ll also boost your ranking in the local search engines.
Tools
For your basic website design you want to have clearly identifiable branding on a solid template which is flexible enough to switch the text, images, video, menus and navigation systems between languages. To achieve this it’s best to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allow for tableless web design and keep your content separate from, rather than imbedded in, each page, allowing you to switch content and tweak the design easily between websites. It also has the added bonus of smaller file sizes for quicker loading.
For multilingual character encoding it’s highly recommended to use Unicode UTF-8 – with individual codes for every character in over 90 languages, it will be able to handle just about any crazy copy you can throw at it.
One last word on design tools – it’s a good idea to keep your use of Flash to a minimum, to keep your load-times down, but also because changing the language of copy embedded in a Flash file means extra hassle, and search engines don’t scan the content in Flash files, meaning it’s rendered useless for your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Design and Navigation
While your basic design should stay the same across all your TLDs, the actual content and navigation systems are going to need to change quite radically between different languages. For starters, you have the consideration of both left-to-right and right-to-left languages – keeping your navigation bars horizontal should solve this issue. Then there’s the question of aesthetic preferences – do internet users in your target market prefer a minimalist page with navigation accessed via drop down menus, or do they prefer to navigate via crowded colourful icons?
Each cultural group will have different specific aesthetic preferences, and it’s worth your while to look into what these are before building each local domain. Be especially careful when choosing colour schemes, as different colours can have very different connotations around the world – for instance, Orange may mean ‘vibrant’ and ‘creative’ in Britain, but in Northern Ireland the colour is inextricably linked with religion and conflict.
Content
Last, but certainly not least in terms of importance, is your website’s actual content – the words and images which will sell your product to the customer. The mistake many businesses make when creating localised foreign language websites is to think that they can take the text from their English language website and just translate it directly into the other language and run with that. This misses out the cultural subtleties of the target market’s language and doesn’t take into account the tone and phrasing that should be used to effectively communicate with the desired consumer.
A customer in Scotland, for instance, might take well to an irreverent, taking-the-piss tone – a customer in India very likely wouldn’t. Not to mention the potential for embarrassing mistranslations, such as when Coca Cola first entered the Chinese market and had the brand name rendered as ‘Ke-ke-ken-la’, not realising until after posting up thousands of billboards that, depending on the dialect, this actually meant ‘bite the wax tadpole’ or ‘female horse stuffed with wax.’
So your website copy should be written by someone with expert knowledge of the target market’s culture, and translated by a professional working into their own native language, to ensure the idiom and rhythm and tone are all pitch-perfect. Keep images in mind as well – no use launching a website for China filled with images of British people enjoying your product, as it’s hardly going to appeal directly to your average Chinese consumer. By thinking of each separate target market from the first stage of your design, you can ensure that each site is perfect for each country and maximise your potential for international profit.
About The Author
Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of global translation provider Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over a hundred employees working in five countries and clients in over sixty countries.
