Website Localisation

Today it is widely accepted that a website is a powerful global business tool and a must for any business. While English is the language of business throughout the world, the need for a website that reaches the potential global audience in the user's language of choice is a challenge facing more and more businesses.

Our services:

At CTC, our team of IT experts and technical translators work together to provide the smartest and most cost-effective solutions for your online needs.

Today, we can easily deal with all technical aspects of website translation, whether your website is HTML, XML, JAVA, FLASH, CSS or ASP. We can translate any contents into most languages while guaranteeing that no formatting or links are damaged thanks to our thorough quality procedures. Your translated website will have the same look-and-feel as the original, while making sure that it is culturally adapted and that it will effectively reach your target audience.
We can also effectively provide weekly/monthly updates to your website within your deadlines.

Read below to learn more about website localisation and its requirements.

Designing a multilingual website

Translating a website raises a number of issues, apart from the translation itself. The web is a global medium, and a site will be most effective if it takes into account the different needs of its global users. That's why it is preferable to design your website with a view to potential translation into other languages.

Technical Issues

Consider the languages you will be translating your site into. There may be a number of compatibility issues in the construction and maintenance of your site depending on the languages you choose. If your users are located in different countries, different standards and formats of software and hardware will raise a number of compatibility issues.

While languages such as English and German or Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian) can be encoded with less than 256 characters, Asian languages often have thousands of characters, so they cannot be encoded in the single-byte, 256 character limit. Languages that require double-byte encoding include Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are difficult to work with on the web. Web browsers are currently not consistent in how they display bi-directional languages. Work-around solutions for displaying these languages are often specific to a particular platform or browser.

While the current practice is to use the target country's dominant browser and language encoding, with the exception of Unicode, there is no generally accepted standard for double-byte character encoding, and there is no one standard in the design of software applications and operating systems. CTC can advise on testing of different programming languages and how they interface with the different language encodings, and on testing and choosing a browser for the construction of your site.

» Create an adaptable interface design

The key factor in designing your Website is flexibility. The user interface is the basic design or layout of each page of your site and is consistent across the site. There are two basic ways of constructing this interface:

• Fixed-width design: This design is often the most visually appealing for single- language sites, but it often becomes difficult to work with when localised for otherlanguages, especially when graphics are involved.

Translation from the source language into another often causes different wordwrapping and varying word and sentence lengths. This leads to the “breaking” oftables used in page layouts or within images.

Designing for a fixed screen resolution, users with a low resolution monitor maybecome frustrated by the need to constantly scroll horizontally and vertically to viewthe complete page.

• Resizable design: This option means the web designer has less control over thepages, but it is often more suitable for a multilingual site. A resizable design allowsfor differences in screen resolution. With a resizable design, the page will appear in aconsistent format across a range of screen resolutions.

A flexible design will also mean pages will be less prone to “breaking” than a fixed- width format. CTC can provide advice on the most suitable design for yourmultilingual website before costly design work has commenced.

» Make the language choice easy

Most sites ask the user to choose their language manually – your users want their choice of language to be an easy one. The ideal interface for the user is one where they make their language choice once only.

Make sure the options are internationally understandable – for a small number of languages simply list each in its own language. Ensure that the option is prominent.
Have a specific URL for each language – users can then bookmark their own entry point and return to it without the need to go through the homepage on return visits.
Allow users to make their choice on any page – many people go to a specific page on your site, other than the homepage, through a search engine or a bookmark.

Cultural Issues

“More than technical or infrastructure problems, cultural problems will be the biggest issue that merchants will face in the global marketplace” (Bruce Guptill, analyst at the Gartner Group).

» Use multicultural or localised visuals

It is very common to find visual metaphors on Australian or American websites. For example, icons on toolbars can refer to language or culturally-specific associations – what may be obviously a telephone booth in the US may look like a cow shed in Asia, for example. Or using flags to indicate a language when many languages are spoken in more than one country. Such use of visual metaphors should be avoided on multilingual sites.

» Create an interface that is not culturally specific

Australian, European and more commonly American – businesses can often reflect values, symbols or idioms that are specific to that culture. The aim of your interface design should be either to localise such references according to each language, or to avoid them altogether.

Examples include reflecting Western values of individualism, private property or sexuality – values that may not be shared among all the language groups, or references to culturally specific rituals.

Other visual elements which may have varying impact according to culture include the use of colour or layout that becomes illogical for right-to-left reading patterns.

If you have any question regarding your website requirements, please contact CTC – our team can help you find the easiest and most cost-effective way to get your website localised into your choice of languages

Please call during working hours a CTC office nearest to you.

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