[thelist] Designing in other languages (German/Japanese)

[Shaun M. Anderson]

Does anybody have any advice on creating a site in another language?

The languages that I'm going to have to be doing in the near future are
German (right away) and Japanese (no scheduled date).

For the German site, the plan is to use the same template/navigation that
our English site does.  That means that I'll really just be copying the
translated content into the pages that we already have.

Possible problems:
1) That navigation doesn't make any sense to someone who doesn't speak
English.  Maybe a cultural thing that we obviously will know nothing about.
(Any Germans that would have an opinion on that?)

2) Since there aren't any German speaking individuals in the office, I'll
need to wait (Often long periods) to get feedback on the pages from our
German office.  They're busy, and web development is low on their priority.
Any thoughts on a good way to manage this? Most of the individuals speak
very good English, so language won't be a problem.

For the Japanese site, I'm at a total loss.  I worried that the navigation
won't make any sense at all.  I'll need to figure out how to use Japanese
character sets (No Idea on that atm).  Same problem with getting content
proof-read as with the German site, except that they don't speak English as
well.

Also, our product is branded with some sort of "Barney type character" in
Japan that I don't think would fit in with the look of our current template
at all.

If anybody has any experience designing sites in a language that they don't
speak, or knows of some good links to information on the subject, I'd love
to hear about it.

Thanks,
Shaun

<tip type=books>
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</tip>