Timeshifting Interactive Blog
Multilingual Site Development
We’ve worked on a number of multilingual sites over the last few years, each coming with its own set of challenges. Often it’s easy to underestimate the extra amount of work an additional language will add. Design is the main area that needs to be considered, but it’s also important not to forget about messaging and quality assurance.
Design needs to take into account the different amount of space each language will need to say the same thing. Problem areas include menus, dialogs and buttons. For example, on any given button, the text in French will be four times wider than in Chinese; this means that not only will the button have to be wider, but its container also needs to be able to accommodate the extra length.
There are roughly four main language groups:
- English: 100% width
- European: on average 130% wider than English
- Complex Scripts (Thai, Arabic, Hindi, etc.): generally about 80% of the width of English
and can be right-to-left - CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean): on average 50% of the width of English
If the design requires copy to fit tightly, then a separate layout for each language or language group is the best option. The alternative is a design with built-in flexibility to handle variations in content width. Designing for the longest language, and allowing for the layout to contract if necessary, tends to be the best plan of attack. Trying to build a design that works for all languages, unless it’s very simple, generally ends up with a poor visual result.
Messaging is easy to overlook, but there are a lot of places where error messages can be generated. There’s the front-end in form validation and the back-end in Ajax responses; all the possible error, confirmation and status messages need to be translated. In addition, Quality Assurance needs to test every combination in every language – and if several languages are involved, the amount of work can really add up.
Multilingual sites can be straightforward if they’ve been well planned, but it’s never a case of just dropping in replacement copy over the English text!