Tips & Strategies for Multilingual Web Design

May 31
10:41

2017

Megan Max

Megan Max

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Internet has successfully removed the barriers of language and has become a global modern utility.

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Most of the websites emphasize on single language but there are some well-established websites which try to provide services to international audiences with the provision of multi lingual solutions. It is a quite tough task and there are many methods of doing that. Multi lingual support is an important part for the accessibility of content in the present era for any big or small website.

Get a translator

You can always take help of a translation software if you are offered content in different languages but you should not completely rely on it. Tools such as Google Translate can be used easily but the translated text at Google is not that authentic and needs to improve on a regular basis. Thus,Tips & Strategies for Multilingual Web Design Articles it is a good idea to get a human translator. You can opt for paid service like Flip lingo or you can use community-driven translation platforms like Native. Mostly humans have better knowledge of local vocabulary and subtle nuances of language.

Present different language options

Any multilingual website is totally useless without the capability of providing translation to different languages. You will find out that multilingual websites normally use a dropdown, which is placed top-right on page. You can also find switchers present in the footer which chooses your selected pattern and make sure that drop down is easily accessible.

Encoding and Fonts

One thing you should always be careful about is the readability of your content, so ensure that character which is encoding in head of the page is always set accordingly. You should consider the actual fonts and your font needs to be compatible with all the languages that must be supported by you specifically for non-Latin based languages. It means that font must contain all glyphs and characters that are used commonly.

Left to Right and Right to Left

Languages do not have any proper direction but there is a script that is always written in does. Let us take an example of Azeri which can be written by using Cyrillic or Latin scripts, and in that particular case LTR (Left to Right is written) or if it’s written in Arabic script then RTL is written (right to left).

URL Structure

There are different ways of structuring the URLs of different multilingual websites. Every option has certain merits and demerits. With the help of this technique, everything can be easily hosted on the same server. It has a very easy setup and you can use Google Search Console for the identification of different languages.

URL parameters

There are some of URL parameters, for example website.com?country=it. URL parameters are not always recommended but they are always very tough for search engines to interpret.  You can use URL language, for example: website.com for the standard US version.

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