Global Web Design and Publishing -- Your Take

August 28, 2005 | 15 Comments

So I’m curious about how people around the world see, use, read, design and publish for the Web. I spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks before I headed out to Mexico looking at Web sites that were built and maintained by people who probably didn’t speak English as their first language and who’s audiences were probably a good mix of English and non-English speaking people.

I also know that quite a few people who visit this site do so from other countries and speak English as a second language. They don’t call it “World” Wide Web for nothing and I’m really interested in learning more about how people around the world—people with different cultural backgrounds, different languages and different perspectives from my own—use the Web.

As an American designer and publisher I often feel there is so much more I could do to accommodate global readers and I’d really like to try and do that. One of the beautiful things about the Web is how close it brings people from all over the world to each other. It’s all about people to me, and the world is a big place.

Tell Me Your Story

I’ve got some more structured things I’d like to do in the coming weeks to learn more about the international Web, but I figured I’d start by throwing out an open-ended request to my readers.

Anyone can respond, but I’m mostly interested in hearing from people who don’t speak English as their first language, but I’d love to hear stories about translation, localization and building sites people who don’t speak your native language—regardless of what that is.

What I want to get is a general overview and idea of how people all over the globe use the Web. If you’re a designer, I’d like to hear how you design for the Web as well. What challenges to you face? Do you feel some sites are easier to use and understand than others? Do you visit English sites much? Do you create your own sites for English readers? How do you see the Web representing your culture? Your primary language? What can English designers, developers and publishers do to make their sites easier to use?

Please, if you leave a comment, let me know where you are from and your primary language.

Filed under: Web General
Keyword Tags: global+web web+publishing writing web+design internationalization localization

Comments

1. Sébastien said:

This is a very interesting subject. I’m French and I live in Paris. As a web developer, I have a website, because, well, I guess I needed one.

I learned English in school but I really learned English thanks to Jerry Seinfeld (I was so hooked on that show) and many, many movies. Mastering the English language is a huge advantage when learning on the web, about the web.

Most of the programming languages are in English. Some statements are pretty close to natural language for the English speaking, but for the rest of us it’s all foreign. Also if you want to be up to date with new languages or versions you have to tackle some English documentation.

As a result I tend to use English names for PHP and JavaScript functions, and also for CSS properties. Somehow #content is much more natural than #contenu. Whenever I start a project with the idea of using French keywords to make it easier for my clients, I always end up confused and go back to English.

My website contains a Journal (in an attempt to break from Weblog). The entire site is ready for multiple languages and some sections are actually translated in English, but the Journal content is in French.

I decided to do so because whatever I say has probably already been said better on other tech sites (like this one) in English. So I guess it helps the English-impaired French crowd (that’s the majority of web developpers no matter how hard they try to fake it).

I should probably say that I didn’t learn computing in school. I learned everything online and on occasions in books (some in French), that’s why I couldn’t have pulled it without speaking English.

On the technical side, I adopted utf-8 for my website, which allows me to never again worry about accents, punctuation (adieu ’ and welcome ’) and non-English (and non-ASCII) characters. utf-8 is becoming popular, and that’s a good thing.

Punctuation is a big problem. The predominance of English content has had terrible consequences on French online typography. Those developpers who didn’t have a clue about proper written French typography started taking after what they saw in English on the web. The result is a terrible mess of English punctuation in French content. As if the limitations of the web weren’t enough.

We also sometimes have to resort to silly translations of common words like e-mail or blogs. We can’t even agree on those terms with other French speaking countries like Canada, and we end up with French words that look and sound totally unfamiliar. Trying to publish web related content in French forces us to use circumvoluted phrases to please the old timers and the purists.

Well, I could go on for hours, I hope this is on topic and helpful.

Posted on August 29, 2005 01:25 AM | #

2. mark said:

I live in Mexico since I was six years old, so I’m not entirely sure if I fit your profile. I consider myself mexican but I can’t deny my gringo side (Canadian actually, but for mexicans it’s almost the same).

About translations: if you translate literally from English to Spanish, the result will seem kind of dry, and if it’s from Spanish to English it will sound redundant and barroque. Any good translator knows this and will sacrifice fidelity for a natural-sounding text.

As for UI elements, English tends to be more economical in space than Spanish. You might find that tab navigation fits perfectly in English won’t work in Spanish because it takes more space than available. If you’re working on a bilingual site it’s best to design first in Spanish, otherwise you might run out of space.

One thing is for sure: ease of use, clarity and simplicity trascend any cultural difference. But there’s a catch: the perception of these characteristics might differ from culture to culture. Whereas a Japanese person might find his 100 button remote control easy to use, a Brazilian person could find it daunting (just an example, I really have no idea).

You’re probably aware of Aaron Marcus’ great article tackling design and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Just in case you’re not, make sure you check it out: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-Interface Design: What? So What? Now What?

Posted on August 29, 2005 01:57 AM | #

3. Tommy Olsson said:

My first language is Swedish.

One major challenge is that our alphabet has three more letters than the English one (å, ä, ö). We also use é and ü, but those count as accented letters. Some encoding standards don’t cater for this, and even those who do sprinkle those letters in weird places throughout the character set. That makes alphabetic sorting a challenge in itself.

On web pages, the encoding can cause problems with forms, since not all user agents support or respect all encodings. For instance, if I declare accept-encoding=”iso-8859-1” on a form, IE/Win will happily send characters encoded with Windows-1252. That can make a result page invalid.

My own blog is bilingual (English and Swedish). The office site has a section with information in English, but is mainly in Swedish (it’s a public agency). Most of the sites I visit regularly are in English.

One courtesy I’d appreciate on American or English sites has to do with units of measurement. If you specify something in miles, it’s nice if you also specify the equivalence in kilometers. Same thing with Fahrenheit vs. Celsius when it comes to temperatures. It’s not all that difficult to convert, but it adds to the task of reading in a foreign language.

Another thing that bothers me sometimes is in address forms, where American sites often *require* that a state be specified, even for other countries. We don’t have states in Sweden; the country is too small for that.

Posted on August 29, 2005 03:25 AM | #

4. Atle said:

I learnt css and html from reading sites like this, so I usually build my sites with english property-names. But when I talk to clients I try to use norwegian to name the parts of the site and functions, that way the client feels at home. When it comes to my sites, I maintain my portfolio-site in both english and norwegian, for potential clients, while my weblog is in norwegian only. There are very few norwegian sites talking about xhtml and css, and a lot of my content is inspired by english sites. So my mission is to get some of the thoughts of the international community to norwegians, with links to sites like this if they’re interested in more.

And, by the way, thanks for the inspiration and insight!

Posted on August 29, 2005 03:28 AM | #

5. Tommy Olsson said:

Oh, one more thing:

In Swedish, we string composit words together, whereas in English you often just put them as separate words (or at least hyphenate them).

This sometimes leads to very long words, which can be difficult to fit into a narrow menu item or column of text. Since Gecko browsers don’t support the soft hyphen, it becomes a problem sometimes.

Posted on August 29, 2005 03:28 AM | #

6. BenKo said:

Hi, I’m from Spain and my first two languages are Spanish and Catalan. Although I studied English at school, I’d say I’ve learn it thanks to videogames, movies and music :)

I write in English at sites which belong to a huge global community, such as my portfolio at DeviantArt, my journal at LiveJournal, etc. I think it’s better because I can take advantage of that global community and get feedback from everybody (being Spanish or not).

However I write in Spanish in my two weblogs. One of them is a personal -just for friends- blog, so it’s obvious it is in Spanish. The other blog is about computers, design and other geek themes. I think it should be in English but:

- I didn’t feel confident enough to start a blog in English. I like to write with correct grammar and ortography, so… :(

- Most of “geek” weblogs I read are Spanish too. And I somehow wanted to belong to the “Spanish blogosphere”.

And about technical aspects, I try to use UTF-8 whenever I can.

Posted on August 29, 2005 04:04 AM | #

7. ramin said:

Tommy already pointed out many of the issues that arise with Swedish. Finnish has many of the same issues - in fact we have even more problems with the lack of soft hyphen support in Gecko-based browsers.

In addition to Tommy’s comments I’d like to point out that many publishing systems have a hard time supporting content in multiple languages. Good URLs should be technology and language independent. I’ve tried to implement this functionality in my wife’s online comic’s publishing system, but even there I unfortunately left in the language code in the archive URLs.

Language detection is already possible to some extent. My approach is to first see if a cookie has been set (signifying that the user has changed the language setting for the site), go through the browser’s accept-language header, maybe use IP-based deduction, fall back to the default.

Defaulting to IP-based language selection is annoying - I hate it when Google is in Finnish for me since my default langauge in all computer usage is English. And I don’t fully qualify for Keith’s criteria since I’m bi(tri)-lingual with English and Finnish as my primary languages.

But I’d like to see more support for multi-lingual content out of the box. Especially storing metadata in multiple languages is a hassle.

Posted on August 29, 2005 04:51 AM | #

8. Janne said:

There are a lot of items, both big and small, that needs to be considered when providing content/site to a specific language and country. I’ve listed some of these (from top of my head, so this is not a complete list by any means) below.

Note that some of the items are really crucial for interpreting the design or understanding the content. For example, people in the Western world think that movement from left to right is advancing, but people in the Middle East may understand it quite the opposite. This is due to the direction of reading.

English language has set the norm for most of the computer and web stuff and until recently everything else has been an exception. Nowadays new standards take the needs of internationalisation into account in the very beginning. For examples, check XSL-FO specification in W3C.

And now, to the list:
* direction of writing (left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom)
* direction of text lines (top-to-bottom, right-to-left).
* related to the two previous ones: the direction of reading a book – not maybe related to web design, but I’ll still include it here
* alphabet, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
* use of accented characters (umlauts, etc.) or other special characters (German double S) in the Latin alphabet family.
* related to the alphabet: which number symbol set is used?
* units (metric vs. imperial)
* used calendar (Christian, Arabic, Jewish, etc.). Is the calendar based on years or months?
* time and date formats (12/24 hour clock, order of days, months and years in dates, etc.), names of months
* words, idioms, numbers, colours, etc. that have specific meaning in a language or culture. For example, white is seen as the colour of death in many cultures. We use black in the west.
* the order of words in sentences – really problematic for internationalising error messages that have parts of user input inside, if not done properly. For example, the French word order is almost always opposite to the English order. And Germany has the verb at the end. As on the lighter side, English has very strict rules about the order, but in Finnish you can change the order as you like and the meaning stays (more or less) unchanged – very handy for poets.

Posted on August 29, 2005 05:54 AM | #

9. Richard said:

I regularly visit sites from many countries. Tommy Olsson’s (who commented above) being one. I am constantly impressed by the content and literary style of many writers for whom English is not their first language. It is humbling for an English ony speaker.
The second thing is that I am an Australian and, ostensibly, you and I speak the same language. But that is not really the case. There are small nuances that can make enormous differences. And I think that Australian and American humour is different, although television is probably homogenising us.
Even within one country the same word can mean different things to people from different areas.
And when all you have to go one are the words and not the personal contact ambiguities and misunderstandings can easily arise. Language and culture are very difficult, especially, as you say, it is a World Wide Web.

Posted on August 29, 2005 06:40 AM | #

10. Seb said:

Too late…

Sébastien Guillon was faster than me. I have almost the same profile than him and agree with about English in my own work. Except that I didn’t learn English thanks to Seinfeld, it’s the web itself who helped me.

Another exception, webdesgn is not my main job. I am also a developer/analyst for ERP like SAP.

Posted on August 29, 2005 10:55 AM | #

11. jot*be said:

I am Jan from Germany. I’ve learned English at school but my best experience concerning this language has been the web and literature. I have a german weblog which is also a playground for new web developing technologies.

The main problem I think is, that one could not speak English much often. Reading and understanding is no problem, since I often prefer books and sites in English.

It has been about 4 years that I’ve switched to tableless CSS design and web standards and the best information sources were mainly the american weblogs which I check frequently.

When I am developing international sites I will take my favorite CMS if it is possible (Typo3), add appropriate language modules, establishing “nice URLs” with the language being the first part of this URLs.

The detection of the language should work automatically and should redirect the visitor to his preferred language. Nevertheless he will have the option to switch the language manually.

For coding principals I refer to Sebastien. UTF-8, naming of tags, attributes, comments in code and much more … I use English, even if it would be a website only in German language. Since I have worked in a team with developers from other countries who didn’t speak much German it has been mandatory.

By the way - I read you weblog for about 3 years. Nice work. Keep on.

Greetings from Germany.

Posted on August 29, 2005 12:22 PM | #

12. Nick Bouton said:

Just a quick note. I’m Canadian, I speak both French and English fluently.

An issue I’ve run into aside from the ones pointed out in the other replies here is bi-lingual websites. I’ve worked on several large multi-lingual sites and I find that it becomes a major challenge because keeping all the content and design in synch is a bit of a nightmare, even with a nicely implemented content management system.

A lot of the smaller/open-source CMS packages out there (for instance, WordPress) have very little multi-lingual support built in from the get-go. You have to add everything in yourself using custom fields and by modifying the default scripts. I’d love to see these packages integrate better out-of-the-box multi-lingual support for site design, content publishing, and just in general.

Posted on August 29, 2005 01:06 PM | #

13. beza1e1 said:

You won’t find an experienced web designer, who is unable to communicate in english. As an effect, we are used to cope with american culture. This implies that i don’t know in which way you could make my experience of you site any better.

The recent development seems to become more regional, i think. Craigslist is an example of local success. Chicagocrime has had it buzz also. I want to support this development, so i force myself to blog in german.

Posted on August 29, 2005 04:08 PM | #

14. Tim said:

I am working on a bilingual (dutch/french)extranet portal for a large financial company in Belgium. One point that hasn’t been addressed so far in the comments is filename specification.

We work with a CMS where every content provider (and there are 60 of them) is responsible for publishing an article in both dutch and french. Now, for coding and transparency reasons, we ask them to assign a common filename to both versions. With english being of course the option of choice, most of our CMS users tend to just use their native language. Which can be very confusing to the end user if he sees, for instance, a dutch url appear in a list of french search results.

Depending on the amplitude of your project, you just may be facing this kind of small reality problems.

Posted on August 29, 2005 11:03 PM | #

15. Felixe said:

I think there’s one aspect of the global web that it’s still developing outside the English-speaking community: different levels of discussion. Flame wars tend to be soaked in their particular folklore and individuals argue different when their background is different. Is not the same to discuss in a Spanish forum, in a French blog or in an American mailing-list. There’s still no standard way for taking this differences into account. Surely, ideas get across but not as it could be.

Not even Google’s translator comes close. It justs spits rubbish like the translating device on Mars Attack. But I’m still not sure if translating is the answer.

Posted on August 30, 2005 04:33 PM | #