 | ||
|
| ||
| ||
|
| ||
Tapani Tuominen
January 8, 1998
The following article was originally published in the Site Builder Network Magazine.
If you are seriously targeting an audience outside your own country/region and building a business Web site for that purpose, you should probably consider localizing its contents. That means you are facing a completely new and unknown set of Web design requirements. Full localization includes adapting cultural conventions -- such as dates, currencies, and so forth -- for your target audience, together with the translation of the text.
Full localization requires lots of resources and can be expensive when properly done. If you have never been involved with a localization project, I don't recommend that you try it alone -- especially if you are building a serious business site. It is better to rely on an expert who already knows your target country/region and the language. Localization is much more than a simple translation. Speaking of translation, some software packages on the market claim to provide decent translations. While they are great for quickly getting a rough idea of the contents of foreign language text, the quality of their translations is far from acceptable for any serious applications.
Once you have a localized Web site, you will need to make a commitment to develop localized contents just as you do with your native-language Web site. A localized Web site is a strong signal to your audience that they can expect service in their own language. For instance, if you create a localized business Web site, be sure that someone is available to answer foreign language e-mail and phone inquiries generated by your Web site. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and money by creating a localized site. Also, remember that the Webmaster maintaining the localized pages should be someone who understands the site's language at least a little bit.
Now you may ask yourself, "If full localization is so complicated and expensive, wouldn't it be better to forget the whole thing?" Don't give up yet! Full localization is not the only way to go. You can do lots of things in your Web site through a process called internationalization.
The first step to localization is internationalization, and any Webmaster can do that. Even when you have no intention to provide contents in other languages or can't justify the cost of full localization, you should consider internationalizing your site. To internationalize your Web site means to adapt its contents and style for the international audience. It is a fairly easy thing to do, once you know the basics, and your site can be written entirely in English.
English is today's lingua franca, and a Web site written in English can very well reach your foreign audience. This is especially true if you expect visitors from geographical areas where English is widely spoken as a foreign language -- regions such as Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Israel, or Taiwan. In fact, if you visit a few Web sites from these countries/regions, you'll notice how even a small corner store may provide some contents in English, in addition to the native language. Also, many international communities, such as medicine, engineering, or aviation, communicate in English.
Pay attention to adapting your text and design to international conventions whenever possible. Favor international and widely accepted standards when they exist. Design the contents of your Web site to be flexible enough to adapt itself for different cultures and people.
Internationalization means adapting design style and conveniences suitable for a worldwide audience. For instance, a detail as simple as date format can be internationally confusing. Americans express dates in month-day-year format, whereas many parts of the world use a different order. A date written as 12/6/97 can mean December 6 for North Americans, but lots of people in other areas would assume that it is June 12. To avoid confusion, it is better to write a date as December 6, 1997 or 6-Dec-97, which is universally understood.
Some countries/regions use their own calendar system, instead of the Gregorian calendar that is used in most parts of the world. You can assume that people of such countries/regions, at least those who can read English, are familiar with the Gregorian calendar. However, if you are localizing your Web site for a region with its own calendar, you may have to deal with this problem.
Time formats around the world vary also, although it is much less of an issue than the date format. Basically, there are 12-hour and 24-hour time systems. If you are designing primarily for international audiences you should standardize to 24-hour format in your Web site.
Keep in mind that when you express time, such as customer support hours, you should always be sure to include the time zone. Acronyms, such as EST (Eastern Standard Time) or CET (Central European Time), should be explained. For an international audience, it makes sense to mention the time difference relative to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), as in the following:
"Office Hours 9 - 17 EST (GMT -6)
If you are selling something on your international Web site, you will need to deal with currency and number issues. People around the world tend to have an idea of the exchange rate between their local currency and the US Dollar. Therefore, when expressing prices in a currency other than the US Dollar, it is a good idea to give rough estimate of the amount in US Dollars, based on the current average exchange rate. Example:
Shipping and Handling: 150 French Francs (about 25 US Dollars)
There are standardized international abbreviations for various currencies. These abbreviations are used by the financial world and in some geographical areas. Examples of such abbreviations are USD (US Dollar) or DEM (German Mark). Don't assume that your readers are familiar with these, though. Be prepared to explain the acronyms if you elect to use them on your Web site.
Number formats are easy to understand across the borders. The main difference is the use of a decimal separator. Some areas of the world use period (North America) in this role, and other areas use a comma for the same purpose (Europe, for instance).
Most parts of the world outside the United States have standardized to metric SI-system. Be sure that you provide information in both systems when talking to an international audience. Temperatures in Fahrenheit should be given in Centigrade as well, length in millimeters should be shown in inches, and so forth. For instance:
Dimensions: 51 x 25 x 76 mm (2" x 1" x 3")
When developing calculation routines (for example, in Visual Basic® Scripting Edition or Jscript™) or ActiveX controls that deal with units of measurement for your Web site, be sure that input and output in both US and metric units is possible.
If your Web site has a form into which visitors can enter their name and address, you'll have to think carefully about its design. The input fields and the routines that process the information should be able to handle various address formats. For instance, a very common mistake is to insist that the visitor enters something in a field labeled State (or Province for Canadians). While this makes sense to people located in the US and Canada, it confuses visitors from other parts of the world, as they mostly don't have a "State" in their addresses. A better approach is to check whether the visitor's country/region is either USA or Canada, and in only those cases display an error message if the visitor omits the "State" field.
When performing validity checks of the data entered by your international visitor, be flexible. To give you an example, it is better to avoid assuming that the ZIP-code or Postal Code, as it is referred to outside the United States, has any particular format or length. For instance, in Canada postal codes consist of two groups of three characters, such as "M5R 3H5"; a French postal code is a five-digit number, as in 92300. In some countries/regions, people may add a country/region code in front of the postal code (for example, F-92300).
Phone number fields should be long enough for any international phone numbers. In some areas of the world, the local phone number can be 12 digits long. Reserve space for the area code and the country/region code, too. When displaying phone numbers on your site for an international audience, it's a good idea to stick with International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) recommendation for phone numbers, as in this example:
+1(416)555-5555
The plus sign represents the international access code that the caller may have to dial first. It is followed by the country/region code (1 stands for the USA and Canada) before the area code and the local number. If you are using Windows 95, you may already be familiar with this standard format of phone numbers, because Windows 95, together with many applications, expects phone numbers to be entered in this standard format. Speaking of phone numbers, keep in mind that in most cases, 800 numbers cannot be dialed from outside your country/region. Be courteous, and provide a regular phone number for international callers to contact you.
When designing your site, avoid culture-dependant symbols, which are not clear to an international audience. A classic example is the American mailbox with a little flag to indicate that there is new mail. This symbol is used on many sites to indicate e-mail, but people outside North America don't necessarily recognize the mailbox. For a Web site, a better symbol would be an envelope, which is universally understood. There are also many symbols that may have different meanings in different cultures. If you have doubts regarding the hidden meanings of some symbols, it is better to use words instead.
If the ultimate goal of your site design is to create a localized version, be aware that words have different lengths in different languages. Keep this in mind when designing various elements for your Web pages. For instance, if you are designing push buttons with text, and you plan to use the same basic design in different language versions of the site, ensure that they are wide enough to accommodate the words in any language. English words are typically shorter than their translation in other languages. For instance text "News" could be translated "Actualités" in French, thus requiring more than twice the space of the English word.
If your Web site receives visitors from many geographical areas around the world and you want to provide personalized service for everyone, you may find Active Server Pages (ASP), with or without MS Personalization Server, a real life saver. Once you have identified a visitor as being from a specific country/region, you can let ASP take care of most Web-page internationalization tasks on the fly.
You are probably aware that Internet domains have extensions, such as .com, .net, .us, .fi, and so forth. Your Web server receives the requester's domain information whenever a page from your site is requested. Sometimes, it is assumed that the domain from which the visitor appears to come provides a clue of his or her nationality. This is absolutely false, and I must warn about using this information to identify Web visitors. While it is true that visitors from domains with a country/region extension are indeed from the same country/region in many cases, this is far from the truth with visitors from .com or .net domains. These domains are used internationally by global and local ISPs, thus making it impossible to identify the country/region in which a visitor is actually located.
As you have seen, basic internationalizing of a Web site for an international audience is not that bad at all. It is merely a question of adapting certain conventions. Even if you are designing strictly for a local audience, be aware that sooner or later you may be contacted by Web surfers or potential clients from the other side of the globe. By internationalizing your Web site from the very beginning, you are well prepared when that happens.
Tapani Tuominen is a consultant based in Paris, France where he runs his Web-development company. He specializes in development issues related to international Internet and intranet applications, and can be reached at tapanit@bearware.net.
A French branch of Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a United States university with a subsidiary campus in the Lorraine province of France, was sued last year by two French activist groups because the branch's Web site 
was at the time written entirely in English. A 1994 French law requires that all public advertising in France be in French. Later dismissed because of a technicality, the case was only one, albeit rather extreme, sign of growing interest in the Internet in the world beyond English-speaking countries/regions.
Before the suit was dismissed, the branch university site had added French- and German-language versions.
-- T.T.
Did you find this material useful? Gripes? Compliments? Suggestions for other articles? Write us!
© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of use.
Back to top