The Nielsen Norman group offers “E-commerce User Experience: Design Guidelines for International Users” (pdf, 2007). You can read about and download these guidelines. There is a charge for the download.
Successful internationalization does more than prepare a website for deployment across cultures and in different languages. There are a number of ways you can optimize your website for search in different regions, where language and culture affect the way people look for information. Read more in “Internationalizing websites for search success” in the December 2009 issue of Tekom’s TC World.
For a thorough explanation of the essentials of Unicode and encoding, visit “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).” This is on the site of a programmer who engages visitors in translating articles. Available translations are listed on the sidebar of the home page.
If you spend a few minutes on delicious.com, you can be rewarded with insights about resources in internationalization and localization, as well as who is active in the community. Explore one user’s links on web localization and then explore some other related searches to discover this world for yourself.
If your organization does business in more than one part of the world, your web team faces the challenge of internationalization and localization of the website.
Internationalization refers to making a product ready for use throughout the world, and localization refers to making a product ready for use in a particular geographic area. For a website, internationalization requires making the code work worldwide, especially to support presenting the site in multiple languages, and developing a design and content for audiences with different cultural expectations.
Several articles are available to help meet these challenges. Four are presented here.
Several basic tips for internationalizing code are presented in Implementing Websites For Internationalization.
If you are providing a website in multiple languages, it’s desirable to avoid creating and maintaining multiple versions of the site. Internationalize JSP-based Websites presents one method.
A design blog addresses the challenge of providing a way for users to change to their preferred language. The author notes there is no standard interface for this. For details, visit Design Examples of Website Internationalization and Localization.
Creating content for readers worldwide is the focus of 7 Easy Tips to Internationalize Your Website. This is part of a larger guide with many resources, Culture Customized Content.
Twitter accounts in multiple languages is among the subjects of a July, 2009 blog post, Pros and Cons of Multiple Twitter Accounts. The author observes that “we are not listening enough to social media conversations on a global scale.” Check the post to learn which countries have the heaviest users of Facebook.
Author: Carol Luttrell
Surveys are popular tools used to assess a condition, opinion, situation, or held value. They come in many forms, such as online and paper questionnaires, in-person interviews, focus groups, telephone, and mail. Sometimes, a technical writer will be asked to get involved in a conducting a survey either in-house or for an external customer. This article discusses issues associated with doing online and paper benchmark surveys (which monitor the progress of something or compare data within an industry) and provides basic information on the roles that a technical communicator may play. Full article in PDF
ITC SIG member Rahel Bailie promotes the concept of content convergence, creating and making available all forms of published information in a networked environment. Reuse is the expectation and the rule, with dissemination of small “bundles” of information to be processed for reuse. Translators have a special challenge to render these bundles correctly in various languages and for various cultures. Rahel comments further and has published an article in the January-February 2009 issue of Multilingual Computing.
