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It's A World Wide Web:
Going International
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While
many websites seem to assume that everyone
lives in America and speaks English, most of
the world, oddly enough, doesn't. If you
want to have a world wide website and
to be successful
internationally, you need to make your
content available in languages other than
English.
Machine Translation
A good first step in having a world
wide
website and taking your place internationally is to offer links to translate
it at a free machine translation service, such as Babelfish or Google’s Page Translator. These services
take your text and attempt to translate it automatically
as best as they can. However, translating text is a
difficult problem, and even quite complicated
grammatical rules tend to produce text that is only just
understandable. It's usable in an emergency, but not
exactly pleasant, and not something you want your
visitors to be relying on – especially considering that
it won't work on interactive pages, and that the number
of languages available is quite limited.
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Hiring Translators
The next step up the ladder, then, is to
consider hiring professional translators to translate
your website's content and navigation elements into each
language. While this is fine for larger companies, in
many cases it's prohibitively expensive, at least if you
do it for more than a few languages. If you are thinking
of hiring a translator, the best approach is to first
get your site translated into English (if it’s not
already in English), and then get it translated into the
languages spoken by your largest groups of visitors.
Volunteer Translators
If you have a popular community website,
or one with articles that lots of people find useful,
then you might find that people even volunteer to
translate your articles for free – you can give them a
little encouragement by putting a message on the bottom
of your pages asking for help in translation. Depending
on what kind of website you run, you might be able to
offer incentives like free products or free membership.
You have to bear in mind that
translations you get from volunteers are unlikely to be
professional quality, but they’ll at least be readable
and approximately correct. Even a very bad human
translator tends to do better than machine translation.
To make sure you’re not putting up any
embarrassingly bad translations, you can give readers an
opportunity to rate and give feedback on the
translation, and remove it if it seems to be doing more
harm than good. You will often find that visitors
suggest corrections to the translation, making it get
gradually better and better.
Deciding What to Send
One of the biggest mistakes international
websites make is asking users to choose for themselves
which country they’re in or which language they want out
of a list. Not only is this annoying for the user, but
it’s insulting if their country or language isn’t there.
The worst thing about all this nonsense
is that there’s absolutely no need for it. Web browsers
send the computer’s country and language settings to
your website in the HTTP headers, if you can be bothered
to take account of them – a tiny amount of scripting on
your part can save your visitors a lot of trouble.
Not only is this approach easier, but
it’s also seamless – the user just goes to your website,
and it’s in the language they wanted. You should still
offer a choice, but make it a small option in the
corner, not the entire front page.
Physical Products Around the World
Of course, a web design article is no
place to discuss the actual logistics of international
shipping, but it is important to design your website
to take account of it. If you’re planning to deliver
physical products worldwide, you need to generalise your
forms enough to take account of it.
Offer address lines that aren’t overly
specific in what they ask for, and do little validation
– no-one wants to be told that their address is
‘invalid’. Also, make sure you change shipping costs
dynamically to take account of the country where the
user is based, as this is more than likely the country
where they’ll want things to be posted to.
You also need to take account of
international payment, and make sure you can accept as
many kinds of payment as possible, as preferences vary
from country to country. Not every country is as reliant
on credit cards as you might expect.
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