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Lessons in making a multi-lingual website

Posted in Programming, Languages, Internet, E-Commerce on November 23, 2007 at 4:57 pm

I confess - I only speak one language (excluding programming languages of course!). Some people might even tell you I have difficulty with this one. However, I was still asked to work on the technical angle of converting a website to a multi-lingual website - to include French and German language variations. The actual “language” side would be handled by someone else - phew I thought, oh and apparently the project would be a breeze. Now, the older I get the more worried I look when people tell me things are going to be a breeze because more often than not they aren’t. This was to become no exception.

Finding a translator was simple enough, our local chamber of commerce were very helpful in this respect. I was a little concerned when there was no project meeting, discussion or even email communication to lay out the requirement but as the “language” side was being handled by someone else I was not too concerned. As long as I received the text then the technical implementation should be quite straightforward.

It took just over a week for me to prepare a notepad file full of text to send to the translators but then a number of Word files arrived via email and to my surprise the job was declared complete. It seems the translators and the person handling the “language” side had decided to approach the translation by saving pages from the website into Word and translate them directly. “Now all you have to do is load them up on the web server and you’re set”. No, I’m sorry I reply - but we are far from “set”. You see the website is dynamically loaded and uses ASP with HTML templates and the content can change following a browser refresh (and some during an image or link hover). In addition, a large amount of text is saved as images to ensure that it is consistent - the translating people didn’t do any translation of image and left them the way they were – ouch.

I still managed to muddle through the French version but the German version had a bunch of missing text which turned out that someone had marked portions of it as hidden text in Word - by default Word doesn’t appear to show hidden text. After several dozen emails back and forth we discovered the problem (by accident as it turns out) but the delays were still there. As I was preparing the notepad file which eventually never got used I also realised something quite important. Certain phrases don’t translate very well and the impact (and sometimes even the meaning) of words and phrases can be lost and even worse much of the content is aimed at the UK market and so refers very much to the UK and to UK guidance and regulations. Of what value, interest or use this might be to someone in France or Germany - I am left to wonder!

So what is the moral of the story? If someone comes along with a job and tells you it’s going to be a breeze - look busy, for heavens sake, look busy.