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It’s no small task to wrangle a website and its resources in one language - let alone multiples.  If you’re taking the time and making the effort to post multilingual content, you’re creating potentially valuable assets for your users around the globe.  You want to make sure that the content is represented accurately and is accessible. 

Recently one of  our clients asked us to weigh in on the presentation of multi-lingual content on their site - an organization with members around the world that produces publications, trainings and other web-specific content in a number of languages. The client wondered how to present the information in an accessible and useful way to their users.

While not an exhaustive list, these points can serve as a backbone for your multilingual content presentation.  The first distinction to make is whether the site is fully mirrored in multiple languages or if it is presenting a limited number of pages.

If the full content exists in multiple languages, providing tabbed navigation to each language (with the full built-out resources under each) is an effective presentation. The International Center for Journalists’ IJNet site does a good job of this. When you click a language tab, the entire page content and all navigation swap out to the language you’ve selected. You don’t want to promise more content than you can deliver, though, so be careful of setting up a parallel nav structure and re-directing users back to English content for non-translated content.  The effect is jarring and, frankly, inconsiderate.   

If your multi-lingual content is limited, you want to make sure you don’t portray the fact that when you click on a language, you’re getting the same content in another language. Presenting a limited number of resources is best handled by directing users to “Resources in…” (or Pages in or Materials in – whatever works best for the audience). A user can then click through to a landing page that aggregates the non-English content by type.

Link placement on the page is critical. Links to multilingual content (even if it’s not a full parallel site) should be displayed prominently and placed above the fold. Providing content in multiple languages takes a significant investment of time and resources. And if you are making the investment, you most likely want to showcase the international consideration and reach of your organization. What you don’t want to do is force users looking for non-English content to hunt around the homepage to find the link, effectively negating the time and energy you’ve put behind developing these resources.

The visual and functional treatment of links is vital as well. The easy one first, you don’t want to use as the visual representation of languages. While they may provide a dash of color, flags represent countries, not languages. What flag would you use to represent Portuguese language content – Portugal or Brazil? Don’t even get me started on the options for Spanish language content.

 

Another bad idea… including a drop-down menu with language choices. This treatment does save space within your page layout but it creates a challenge for languages that are character-based such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

 

While listing out each of the language options in their “native” spelling may take more space, it allows non-English reading users to identify their preferred language easily. Also, displaying each content language also serves to showcase your organization’s commitment to international audiences.  InfoComm currently does this on their site.    In addition, to ensure they appear correctly you should use images for the nav items, as opposed to text based labels, to ensure that the labels display as intended. Most computers can handle all language characters but some cannot.

 

Where should limited multi-lingual resources live on the back-end? I’d suggest they live in the file structure with the parallel English pages. That way, the file structure makes sense in terms of linking and, if (when!) the content grows to a level where a parallel or sub-site can exist, it will be easy to find & identify the resources.

If you are presenting multilingual content, Kudos!  If you’re considering it, bahati njema, Bonne chance,  Buena suerte, Danke, Good luck, Lykke til, Sretno and Желаю вам удачу!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Accessibility, Information Architecture, Usability, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.