Ten Major Tips to Develop a Multilingual Web Site to Work
If you are living in a country that its native language is something rather than English
language, then you may like to develop your website to offer content in the language of your
own country.
There are millions of websites on the Internet that are all in English language but there
are
billions of people on the earth that speak in a different language and are not familiar
with
English language.
However, most of the Internet users are basically familiar with English language and
could
use the Internet but there are many subjects that are hard to understand for those
people
whom their language is not English.
One example is websites related to pharmaceutics. There are tons of very difficult to
understand phrases in the content. The other example is educational websites that
basically
should provide content in the local language not English language.
You may have many clients and business partners that wish to read your sales copy
and
product information in their own language.
So, having a website that provides the content in a language rather than English
language is
necessary for you. Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Dutch, France and many other languages
are
general samples of most used languages on the Internet.
For you to start a multilingual website, it is vital to consider some tips before starting
to
design and develop your websites:
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1- The Code Page
----------------------------
The best code page that you should choose for your web pages is Unicode. Unicode is
a
kind of numeric presentation of characters that is two bytes and so can contain up to
65535
characters to show. Until now, there have been no human being languages in the
universe
that have had more than these much characters. So, by using Unicode, you are able
to
show all characters of your language. To represent your web page as a Unicode page,
add
below line of code in the head part of your page:
---------------------------------
2- Tools For Development
---------------------------------
For creating web pages in Unicode format, you should have a tool to be able to type in your
language. One of the tools that are widely used by web developers is Microsoft Front Page.
If this tool is installed on Windows XP then you have the most powerful set of software to
create Unicode documents. FrontPage is a WISYWIG tool for creating web pages and you
can easily choose the language of your web page in options of the page and appropriate
HTML tags would be automatically inserted in the code.
---------------------------------
3- Nature of the Language
---------------------------------
If your language is Right-To-Left like many of Asian and Middle East languages, for
example, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, you should tune your operating system to be able to
switch from Left-To-Right to Right-To-Left typing method to be able to type from Right and
from Left. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, you can configure your system for multiple
languages and keyboards, each of them having different kind of input methods. For
example, you can add Farsi as the second language of your Windows and then switch from
English to Farsi by pressing a combination of keys and start typing in Farsi. Also switching
from RTL to LTR would be possible by another key combination.
-------------------------------------------------
4- Navigation and Design Considerations
-------------------------------------------------
Some languages force to apply some changes in the design and navigation of your website.
For example, if you have a vertical menu bar, you may put it in the left of your pages for
English pages and in the right for Arabic pages because Arabic is a RTL language and
people are used to start reading pages from right to left. However this is not a rule, but it is
better to consider it in designing pages. Other issue is the entrance page. If your website is
in two languages, you may add an entrance page that makes client choose the navigation
language of your website. This page could be a very nice graphical page with two options
for choosing desired language and then enters the web site in that language. In some
cases, you may consider one language as the base and eliminate entrance page. In this
case, you assume most of the visitors may use a language that is dominant and they enter
automatically the web pages of your web site that are in that language. However, visitors
would see a small icon in web pages that lets them switch to the other language. Other
method is to use IP2Country services that can find the country of the visitor from its IP
address and by adding some simple dynamic code to your pages, you would be able to
switch to the language of the visitor. However, this method is not %100 accurate and you
should consider some percent of fault in recognizing the country of the visitor.
-----------------------------------
5- Font Face Considerations
-----------------------------------
When you are creating your web pages in a language rather than English, you would be
limited in using font faces. There are a few font faces in windows that are installed
automatically and can show multilingual characters. If you like your visitors view your pages
correct without any need to install fonts, you have to use those minor number of multilingual
fonts. One of the best font faces is Tahoma that is somehow easy to read and contains all
Unicode characters also is included in Windows.
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6- Database Driven Web Sites
-------------------------------------
If your web site is a database driven and you have forms that clients may fill and be posted
to database, there would be lots of very technical issues that you should consider to be able
to collect and retrieve data in different languages. This part is beyond the aims of this
article.
----------------------------
7- Search Engines
----------------------------
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a major issue for multilingual web sites and you should
be aware that not necessarily all major search engines and directories handle multilingual
web pages perfectly and your web site may not be listed in many of them. Google is a
search engine that indexes multilingual web pages too. However there are some issues and
difficulties but it works well enough for your web site to be indexed in your language.
----------------------------
8- Domain Name
----------------------------
No matter in which language is your web site, the domain name of your web site should be
in English because at this time, having a domain name in other language is not a very easy
thing to have and multilingual domain names are a new issue and is under development.
There are some solutions but are not yet set perfectly. So, I suggest you forget those
solutions and choose an English name for your web site.
-----------------------------------
9- Web Server And Hosting
-----------------------------------
However major web servers, like Microsoft IIS and Apache both support multilingual web
pages, but I strongly recommend you to ask the hosting company for this issue and make
yourself sure that there wont be problems for your web pages to be served by the hosting
company.
--------------------------------
10- Name Web Site Files
--------------------------------
Never use Unicode characters in the name of your web pages. However your operating
system, like Windows, lets your choose the file names in Unicode characters but be %100
sure that theses web pages would have serious difficulties both server side and client side.
In many cases, you wont be able even to upload your web pages to your host space and
clients browsers also wont be able to recognize the name of page and would generate
error. This is true for name of images, flash files, scripts and other pages. Just use English
names.
However I have tried to cover major issues in developing multilingual web sites but this
issue is something that needs experience and you should yourself discover many of new
issues that are not included in this article.
About the Author
Mahmood Bashaash, Tehran, Iran
info@mahmoodb.com
http://www.mahmoodb.com
Mahmood Bashaash is the owner of SGNetway (
http://www.sgnetway.com) company
which is focused on developing web sites and web applications. SGNetway is
specialized on managing outsourced projects and uses Microsoft .Net platform
with C# to develop complicated web applications and web services. Mahmood
Bashaash is the author of www.MahmoodB.com and www.appliedmarketingtips.com
websites focused on Internet marketing tips and tricks. To access his articles,
visit:
http://www.mahmoodb.com. His native language is Persian and his web site
is totally in Persian language.
