Multilingual websites: 3 important aspects
If you want to make your site available in multiple languages, there are important aspects you need to take into account. I will start with a list of three essential aspects and then give a detailed explanation of these aspects.
- Site structure
- Search engine optimization
- Quality of translations
1. Site structure
You can make your site multilingual in many ways. The approaches I see the most are:
- domain based: using multiple domains with a different top level domain
- template based: a dropdown box that changes the language used on a site
- environment based: for example by detecting the browser’s “accept-language” variable
Each approach has it’s own pros and cons. The best you can do is combine the pros of the three approaches.
For the site widgets.com, you would get multiple domains so your competitors won’t capture them. Register widgets.de, widgets.cn, etcetera. Do this for all the languages you want to support and redirect these domains to your main site.
Secondly use a content managent system that supports multiple languages by means of language files/templates. This gives you the possibility of easilly changing the language without rewriting all pages.
On top of that you can use the environment variables to detect the most probable language of the user. You can look at the browsers accept-language variable, but you might also want to look at the reverse lookup of the users ip. Most ISP’s offer reverse lookups in the form of cable-1.0.168.192.cable-isp.de. Apperently your visitor is from Germany and there is a big chance that he or she is speaking in German. Remember to always give your user the option to change the language to something else though.
Combining all three approaches is not that much of a hassle. Registering domains is easy, detecting environment variables is not that hard too. The only big change is adapting or changing your site’s CMS to support multiple languages. If you use some kind of Open Source or proprietary system you might be lucky as many systems support this out of the box.
2. Search engine optimization
The second important aspect is SEO. What implications do the changes have on your search engine ranks? This is really something that can only be learned from experience. Looking at others can be a big help too, so I decided to look at the big sites and see what they do. When you look at Apple.com and Microsoft.com you’ll notice they use just their .com domains and forward their international domains to subpages like apple.com/nl/ and www.microsoft.com/netherlands/. Try it for yourself by going to Apple.nl and Microsoft.nl.
I personally think it is not a good idea to make different language versions of your site under different domains. Especially if you start to strongly interlink these domains with eachother. Search engines might see this as spam. If you host these sites on the same server it might look even spammier. I’m not sure about this, nobody is, but using multiple domains for the same company does instinctively not feel like a good idea too, don’t you think?
There’s another solution: using subdomains like en.widgets.com and nl.widgets.com. Keep in mind that a subdomain is a totally different site in the eyes of a search engine. This does not have to be a problem at all. Look at Wikipedia. It has different content under it’s different language subdomains. However, if you have the same content with the only difference being the language, this is a very bad idea. Your subdomains will have to build up a reputation of their own, including a page rank and backlinks. Using only a single domain and no subdomains is obviously the better choice for a business site that simple wants to offer translated pages to their international customers for convenience.
3. Quality of translations
This is obvious, but I want to mention it just to be complete. Go get some good translators. Make sure you let someone from outside read the translated pages. This is especially important if you have a business and you want to look professional. Bad translations are worse than no translations at all. You don’t want to look like a fool. Before you hire someone to translate you might want to ask them for some earlier work. This is no guarantee that they are good though. You really need to let someone proof read the translations, preferrably someone speaking the language natively.
Leave a comment if you have anything to add or if you want to share your experiences with multilingual websites. I’d love to hear from you.