subject: Six Key Elements about Website Translation & Localization [print this page] Author: Linda Burns Author: Linda Burns
Economy globalization brings enormous changes to business all over the world. Nowadays, more and more companies expand their business outside their own country. In the internationalized process, corporate websites become one of vital factors for business exhibition and information communication. In the past, there were only two user interfaces in many corporations' cross country websites, that is, native language website and English language website. However, because of constant development of international business and increasing number of country-differentiated clients, misunderstanding appears in a lot of aspects and of course, client loss increases. But multilingual websites could effectively help solve such kind of problems. Today, many companies offer multilingual website translation and localization services like Golden View and E-Cchina. The basic rule of website translation is not to change the original structure of the original website. Under the rule, the translated website is almost the same as the original one unless clients have some special requirements. Such kind of translation could help clients save cost, but it might not fit the local market culture, habits or other aspects. Website translation and localization is different from usual document translation. Many other factors will be involved in the process like color option or culture consideration besides pure text translation. For example, people in most western countries hate the number 13 while Islamic country loathes yellow. If you want your website more acceptable by local countries, those aspects couldn't be neglected. The code issue must be solved in the translation procedure, or mojibake would be generated. UTF-8 is a general code accepted by browsers of most countries and areas, so messy codes hardly appear if you use this code. But there are still some countries' browsers incompatible with this code. Under such circumstance, some adjustment is necessarily made accordingly. The letters in the website need to be adjusted accordingly. Most western website languages' words are around 8pt in measurement because that size letter makes the whole websites look beautiful. However, characters in Chinese websites are usually more than 12px; if not, viewers couldn't see what the character is clearly. The words in Japanese and Korean websites also need to be a little bigger. Once the words were adjusted, the structure of the websites was necessary to make some adjustment too for maintaining original appearance of the website. Website optimization is a value-added service. This job includes keyword arrangement in the web page, keyword density management, keyword translation of the webpage code, and the translation and the adjustment of relevant description. After the website go on line, it need to be submitted to important local search engines like Baidu and Fireball. The last key issue in website localization translation is about the service procedure. A full-set service is not just confined to text translation, it also contains flash, picture and other elements. Therefore, it is necessary for clients to offer relevant source code like webpage source code, flash source code, picture source code and other codes. If clients are unable to provide such code, translation companies might spent more time on translating and localizing websites. The translation and localization of website are not as easy as a piece of cake. If any of those factors was neglected, you might encounter some difficulties in your business expansion and prosperity, although these factors seem to be of no account.About the Author:
