• Choose countries you already sell to and countries with sufficient online audiences to attract new customers.
• Make sure you establish your logistics plan in advance (i.e. documentation, sales and fulfillment).
• Map a strategy to main English web content and localized pages.

Not all web sites have to be translated. It depends who your market is, what you are selling and, how much English your target market already understands. For technical products and services, English is commonly understood and only a 'jumper' page needs to be translated (with links to your English pages.)

Conversely, web sites for products and services that are marketing to a broad audience (entertainment, household products, etc.) need to be translated as much as you can afford. Not translating will always make a portion of your audience click elsewhere since they cannot understand English.

If you're convinced you need to translate part of your web site to attract visitors and have a plan to support new international customers, how do you decide which languages? Make sure your decision is based on countries you already sell in and consider the population of online users in each country. Japan, German and France are certain choices followed by Spanish (European and Latin American), Chinese and Korean. Keep in mind native language web sites are not only viewed by customers in Asian or South America. Many Hispanics, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese live in the US and prefer various media in their native language.

Localization Strategy

Most web sites are published as static or individual HTM pages. Dynamic web sites publish text and images stored in a database. In many ways, dynamic or database driven web sites are easier to publish in multiple languages. The first step to publish a dynamic web site in multiple languages is to modify the database to include tables for each desired language. Then the database 'calls' are modified to include a language identifier. Based on your desired languages, target language content, images, and meta tag data are displayed to the user. With dynamic sites, you can chose only the most critical content to translate based on your budget. The remaining pages can remain in English and translated as funds are available.

For static web sites, a target language directory is created on the web server to store all target language HTM files. A target language navigation scheme (flags or country names) is hard coded within each language static page. A unique set of static HTM pages are created for each language. The localization process for static pages is fairly straightforward but is not easily updated.

If you are considering more than three target languages, we do not recommend building your multilingual site with static pages. The best approach is to convert your static page site into a database or dynamic site. The dynamic architecture maintains all of the content in database format. Thus it can be updated quickly in a central location.

How To Get Pricing

The first step is to contact us and let you know your goals. Do you need all of your site localized? How do we handle forms? What about linked PDF files on the site? One domain or many? How do we navigate between languages? Based on your information, we can 'spider' your existing English web site and download all of the pages and images. Once we have all of the files from your web site, we can provide you with a cost proposal based on the total number of pages, English word and images. This initial quotation can be used for budgeting. Final costs will be determined upon receipt of your 'web directory' on CD for final evaluation.

The Process

Based on our evaluation of your web site files, we will extract the text and send to our team of professionals for translation. Many times, our translators perform their work within the native database application. Also included is text from site images. While the text is being translated, our engineers will create the target language navigation as needed for static or dynamic functionality. Target language images are created from the original 'layer' graphic files. Translated text, images and target language navigation are posted to our development server for testing and review. All links and forms are tested thoroughly. In addition, each translation is reviewed by a native speaking professional linguist to ensure punctuation, grammar and accuracy. Also, our clients have the opportunity to review all files on our production server. Once all work is approved, the localized web site is published on the customer server.

Other Considerations

1. Avoid navigation buttons and images with embedded English text. Additional costs are associated with editing these images and resizing foreign language text.

2. Be sure to translate all meta tag and keywords on your site.

3. Test your server to ensure foreign language characters will be recognized in forms.

In summary, web site localization projects do not differ substantially from documentation projects. The technical aspects are different but the basic linguistic quality standards must be followed. Let us know when you are ready, and we will be happy to work with you to achieve you web site localization goals.

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