Making Your Website Multicultural

Posted on 03. Apr, 2010 by Christian Arno in Web Design

The internet is a marvelous place – millions of websites and millions of people (nearly two billion, in fact) out there mixing and chatting and buying and selling, like some giant virtual bazaar. Moving into this bustling and profitable marketplace is a top priority for any serious business in the modern economy, but so often when businesses move online they fail to think beyond their own language group. According to Google Zeitgeist, half of all Google users are searching in languages other than English, while Internetworldstats.com has found that 78% of internet users are non-English native speakers – if you set up your site purely for English speakers, then that’s a significant chunk of your potential online customers you’re giving a cold shoulder to.

Website Accessible Across Languages

Image Source: Ottoboni.se

The key to creating a website that’s easily accessible across languages and cultures is to think in terms of your international audience from the very beginning. You don’t want to have to go to the expense and trouble of creating a completely different website for each and every country, but you do need to localize your domains and content to effectively reach different groups. What you want is a basic design template that can then be adapted to suit the peculiarities of each target market.

This means a template on which you can easily switch the copy and the colour scheme to appeal to each demographic (be aware of what particular colours mean to each of your target markets – don’t make the same mistake as telecoms company Orange, who launched in Northern Ireland in 1994 with the slogan ‘The future’s Orange’, somehow thinking that they would not then be associated with the Loyalist Protestant Orange Order – needless to say this did not go down too well with the local Catholic population).

Your template should be flexible enough to take into account different navigation requirements, for instance, by keeping the navigation bars horizontal to be easily changed between left-to-right and right-to-left languages. It should be able to switch easily between being minimalist (currently popular in the west) and image heavy (popular in the east).

Switching Between Languages

Image Source: Tanktheory.com

It should use CSS rather than HTML, to allow for easy switching of content between websites, and should use Unicode UTF-8 for its character encoding, to save you headaches when switching between languages. But most important of all, it should have copy that is written specifically with the target audience in mind, which has been translated by a professional working into their own native language.

There’s potential for error everywhere when you’re switching your copy into a foreign language. It might be tempting to just allow Google Translate, or Babelfish, or a similar automated translation tool to do the work for you, but consider just how garbled the copy on, say, an Italian site becomes when you translate it using an automated tool and you can see why it’s not a good idea. As clever as they are, automated translation tools have no sense of nuance or slang or the delicate flow of a language, as such the literal word-for-word results end up as pure nonsense more often than not. Nothing makes a brand look more foolish than having garbled or misspelled copy – unless you happen to be a greengrocer with a penchant for extraneous apostrophes – so if you want to keep your potential foreign language customers from doing little more than giggling at your site and then leaving, you’ll need to make sure all your copy is translated by a specialist in the language and, indeed, even the specific dialect.

Research

Image Source: Nb2.com

Lastly, it’s important to do your research into each particular target market – different cultural groups have different expectations and look for completely different things in a website. Research has shown that consumers from cultures in which much of communication is implicit, non-verbal and ruled by the mores of social conduct – for instance Asian or Middle Eastern cultures – tend to take more meaning from the context of a website, what the imagery says and what the brand says about itself, than consumers from countries where communication is direct and the meaning is always included in the message, such as Germany. Those consumers would much prefer that a company get straight to the point and explain what they are selling and why it’s worth buying.

Taking into account research statistics revealed by Common Sense Advisory Inc. in their 2006 report Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters for Global Websites, which showed that 85% of consumers won’t purchase a product if they can’t read about it in their own first-language, and you can see exactly why localizing your website content and online marketing campaigns is an absolutely essential step if you want to reach out into non-English speaking markets. By thinking of your specific local audiences from the start, you can make sure your website will appeal to any demographic or language group, and maximise your potential for profit.

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Tags: cultural web design, Design, Web Design, Web Development