THEORY AND PRACTICE

Content Goes Global

by Lowell Rapaport

To solve the technical challenge, it helps to start with a content management system that can support multiple languages. "It's not enough just to have a button to click to have multiple language support," says Tom Kuhr, vice president of product marketing at Day Software, a Basel, Switzerland-based content management system provider that routinely deals with multiple languages. "Content management systems have to support Unicode and have the ability to format text according to each language's requirements. Some languages, like Hebrew, are read from right to left and others, like Chinese, are read in columns. Your content management system has to be smart enough to know how text should be presented."

Unicode is used to encode languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic that don't use the Latin alphabet. If you need to present content to older computers that can't support Unicode, Web pages have to be rendered into a graphic image that can be downloaded and viewed.

"Unicode support has to be uniform throughout an application," Kuhr warns. "Many content management systems are put together from pieces acquired from different vendors. All the pieces have to have multilingual support for globalization to work."

But technical hurdles are only half the challenge, says Yoram Nelken, founder and CTO of Banter, a San Francisco-based maker of customer relationship management software. "All languages need to be treated equally from the users' perspective," says Nelken. "When a Web site indicates other languages are available, the names of the languages should be presented natively rather than as English translations."

The idea is to avoid any language or nationality bias. National flags should indicate content intended for a particular country, not a language, since most languages are shared among several countries. Also, there should be no visual idioms or visual metaphors that do not translate well. "American companies, for example, use an icon of a blue mailbox to represent an email link. This icon means nothing to non-Americans."

Content management systems that include multilingual support should have a workflow that either forces the content creator to translate content or transfers content to a professional translator. "Quality control is vitally important, both to make sure that the translation flows naturally and to make sure it genuinely reflects what the original author wrote," says Nelken. Translators should consult with content authors to ensure accuracy.