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| Speak My Language |
March 6, 2002 |
By E. Lisa Moses
THE SIREN SONG OF GLOBAL INTERNET MARKETING IS getting louder by the day and countless companies want to follow it. But adding multilingual content to a corporate Web site can be a daunting task.
“The time is right for Canada’s exportoriented small and medium enterprises to use the Internet to expand global sales,” said Jim Tiessen, assistant professor of
international business at McMaster
University’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Business in Hamilton. “But most have yet to go full steam ahead in developing multilingual Web sites.”
A multilingual site can be the first step toward entering the global marketplace, but it’s easy for the effort to stumble on a variety of hurdles. “[Sites] must be able to
handle inquiries in the targeted languages, possibly using e-mail,” Tiessen said.
“Companies also need to register their
domain names in those languages so foreign markets can find them.”
If you’re thinking of joining the
multilingual Web site fleet, here are a
few pointers:
Chart your course: Before you begin
designing and programming for another
culture, make some strategic decisions
based on target markets, corporate
goals and company resources. Ask
yourself if you really need to translate the entire site, or just your marketing pages—your homepage, company profile and product overview sections may be a good starting point.
Calculate how much maintenance
multilingual pages will need, keeping
in mind that every change will require
translation, editing, coding and possibly design. Tightly edit the
English version of your site to reduce
what you spend on translation.
Watch your language: Establishing
language standards will not only save
money but also ensure translations are
based on consistent terminology. Since
translators charge by the word, pare
down your English to the basics, and
stick to standard wording. Translating
the phrase “reap the benefits of” costs
twice as much as “benefit from,” and if
you say “excellent” seven different ways, the cost rises by a factor of seven.
Remember, too, that most translations
will be longer than the original text.
In German, for instance, a 50-character phrase such as “help you communicate with English-speaking markets” becomes the 78-character “um Ihnen bei der klaren Kommunikation mit englischsprachigen Märkten zu helfen.” Alphabets also influence the length of a document: the Roman alphabet (Western European) takes up less space than Cyrillic, Arabic and others.
Factors such as these should influence
programming and design.
There is much ado these days about
software-based machine translation(MT). While MT is both fast and relatively inexpensive, relying on it too heavily can be dangerous. For example, one computerized translator turned “having a bad hair day” into “having a defective day of hats” in Italian. To avoid embarrassing
yourself globally and ensure you’re
talking in language your audience understands, use translation professionals who are native speakers of your target group.
A good translator will localize the
language to the culture, characteristics, dialects and other peculiarities of your markets. Québecois and Parisian French are prime examples of cultural variations
of the same tongue.
For large Web sites and documents,
translation memory software can save
money by avoiding duplication. These
programs store translated text in memory and then offer suggestions from the database to the human translator of a document.
But these are cost-effective only for
large jobs, not minor changes.
Get with the program: Once your
English site has been translated, it’s ready for coding. HyperText Markup Language ( HTML) uses a set of codes to define the content and structure of Web pages and deliver them to computer screens. To create a new version of a site in a different
language, the Western European text can
be copied into new HTML fields and
renamed and relinked for the new site.
However, Cyrillic, Asian and other non-
Roman text cannot simply be copied,
because these fonts must be treated
differently.
HTML accommodates only 255 characters
(letters, numbers and punctuation).
For our 26-letter alphabet this is plenty, but Chinese, for example, has more than 10,000 characters.
Specialized coding can solve this size
problem, but Chinese and other non-
Western fonts will appear as random
characters on screen unless special “reader software” is downloaded to the user’s browser. Another option is to present text as an image, and embed that into HTML.
These issues, however, are slowly
vanishing as the world adopts Unicode, a new universal coding standard. Its more than 95,000 characters work with any programming language, platform and
browser. Unicode enables consistent
handling of text in most major scripts.
On with the odyssey: If you decide to
set sail on a multilingual Web site course, your webmaster can likely get you going.
If not, a growing number of companies
(mostly U.S.-based) offer international ecommerce solutions that include multilingual Web site development, for both global and local audiences.
One of these is Admerasia Canada, an
agency that handles Web design, hosting
and maintenance, language and ecommerce
solutions. Admerasia also helps companies target different communities
within Canada. General manager Cesar
Virina said Asian, Caribbean, African and Eastern European markets are emerging, particularly for companies based in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Virina uses the term “multicultural” instead of “multilingual” site because “connecting with today’s consumers goes beyond language to bonding and establishing cultural rapport, even if you’re speaking to
them in English or French.”
Web sites for general information
Canadian Translators and Interpreters Council
www.synapse.net/~ctic
Localisation Industry Standards Association
www.lisa.org
MultiLingual Computing & Technology
www.multilingual.com
Society for Technical Communication
www.stc.org/SIGs/international.html
Universal Usability in Practice
www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/index.html
Unicode
www.unicode.org
Verisign Global Registry Services
www.verisign-grs.com
Multilingual Web site developers
Admerasia Canada
www.admerasia.com
Alpnet
www.alpnet.com
Berlitz GlobalNET
www.berlitzglobalnet.com
Basis Technology
www.basistech.com
Bowne Global Solutions
www.bowneglobal.com
Idiom
www.idiominc.com
Metalion
www.metalion.com
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