Creating websites in a European context turns into a mess before you know it. Do you know how to put a date on a webpage? Nice, but it is definitely not enough. The fact that we have different communities and regional differences in language skills makes it virtually impossible to stick to English or to use a one to one translation.
But if you do have a one to one translated website, it will take a lot of time and money to get it translated and maybe that is something you don’t have. So not everything will be translated by the time it is published.
Here are some things I had to take into account creating and maintaining a one to one translated website:
- Don’t use a splash screen for selecting the language. Set a default language. Before you choose a default language know where your audience is coming from.
- Use a language switch on every page where the translation is available. This is an important one cause you really need to build this into the system in advance. Assuming everything will be translated will get you into trouble eventually.
Mention explicitly that a translation is not available. - Combine the language switch with alerts. Add a feature where people can leave an email address and get an update if the document is ready. Use it to decide what to translate and what to leave as is.
- Do you have enough space for translated navigation labels? If you go from a European language to the common language English you don’t have to worry that much because it will probably take up less space. The other way around can cause some problems.
Make sure to translate all these little things like copyright statements, print buttons and “go to the top of the document”-links into both languages. - Use the international format for telephone numbers.
- Publish everything in UTF-8. No more worries about character entities when working with XML and HTML
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to translations for the web and I think that many rules used in print apply to the web as well. These are solutions to problems I had to fix. So if you solved other issues, please leave a comment and add your solution to this short list.