Having a website in more than one language gives your users a new level of an improved experience, especially if they are not native to your language. Translating the content is the first problem and then come all of the design hurdles. It can be difficult but it can be done.
Here are some tips on having a multilingual website:
Translate
Have someone translate all of the content before you even start with your design. Don’t rely on a translation software because they still have to improve a lot before people can actually use them for serious translation. The accuracy varies and it’s not good to make mistakes in another language. Find a real translator that can help you with your text.
Present the options
Without the ability to choose languages, your options are useless. So, you need to find a way to offer languages in an easy and accessible way. You may have seen drop down menus, on top right of the page options and so on. These are all great and you can use them. There are also switchers in the footer and so on. Put it somewhere easy to spot and make it easy to use. You can use flags to mark languages as well. But, this is not the best choice for many reasons - the country doesn’t equal a language always, it might be hard to see and so on. It’s best to order languages alphabetically and list them as they are.
Detect the default language
If you want to set your page to go to the default language that your visitor is speaking. You should also not hide the other options because you never know which language might suit the user best.
Make it readable
Your page should be readable so you need to make sure that the character encoding is set properly. Consider the actual fonts. It needs to be compatible with fonts of all languages, especially when related to non-latin languages. Font has to contain all of the glyphs and letters that are used in other languages as well. Some languages have hundreds of characters and the font files need to cover them all. This can make them heavy. Consider this before refining character groups which you have to include in the files.
“Several websites offer non-latin character fonts so make sure that you find all of the alternatives and pick the one that suits you,” says Jennifer Smiles, a team lead at
NextCoursework.
Other fonts might have a different line height or character size so you should make them large enough to be readable and understandable.
Right to left or vice versa
Script the language is written in has a direction. This means that different languages need to be written in different directions to be understandable. For instance, Azeri is a language which can be written in either Cyrillic or Latin scripts when you would use the left to right but it can be written in Arabic as well, in which case it would be right to left.
You can mirror the layout of the website in these cases. Every element should be mirrored.
URL Structure
There are many ways to structure the URL when discussing multilingual websites. Every option has its perks and pitfalls. You can use a country code top level domain when it’s linked to a specific country. This makes it clear that the page is targeting the users in that country. The location is then irrelevant and it’s easy to separate websites. But the disadvantage is in the availability of the domains and the cost of it. You can use a subdomain and a generic top level domain. This is easy to set up and should be quite functional. But users might not always recognize the language from the URL.
“You can also use subdirectory and generic top level domain which is often used to structure content and can be used for geotargeting and so on. Everything can be hosted on the same server and set up is easy,” says Jeremy Angles, a web developer at
Australia2Write and
Britstudent.
There are many more considerations but these have just been some of the basic ones that you need to keep in mind. Hopefully, these will set you on the right path to having a great multilingual website and you will manage to build it with ease.
