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

[Martin Kuplens-Ewart]

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- -----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Shaun M. Anderson
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 11:40 AM
To: 'thelist at lists.evolt.org'
Subject: [thelist] Designing in other languages (German/Japanese)


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.

- ----------------------------------------------------------

Shaun,

Among the issues that you have indicated above, there is also very
frequently the issue of idioms - figures of speech used in one
geographical region... Small cultural references are deadly when
localising a site, or any other product or document for that matter.
You might, if the money is there, consider going with a professional
translation service for the key sections of the site... The
mission-critical "we do this, and our mission is that" stuff; which,
if poorly translated, will destroy the firm. [nothing like a good bit
of apocalyptic stuff to get the adrenaline going :P]

Umm, don't forget other cultural references in the form of colours!
Very important that... And images too... Some images might be okay
for north america/europe, but considered entirely off-limits in
asia... Colours have the same thing... A number of colours have the
complete opposite meaning here from the meaning there.

Is there a URL that one might be able to visit to be able to offer
further assistance/suggestions?

Hth,

Martin Kuplens-Ewart,

guy who does stuff,
TakingITGlobal - http://www.takingitglobal.org

_________________________________________________

Let's face the obvious. Yesterday we were nerds. Today we're 
the cognitive elite. Let's conquer. - Chester G. Edwards 
_________________________________________________

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