White Paper: Preparing Your Website for Localization (cont.)
2. Make your content localization-friendly.
- Make sure your site is properly internationalized. Ensure that the programming of your site will be able to properly handle the input, storage, retrieval, sorting and display of different character sets as well as time, date and currency formats. Your LSP should be able to provide a “globalization readiness assessment” or “internationalization assessment” where specially trained software engineers analyze your site for common internationalization problems.
- Develop your site in Unicode. Unicode is the universally adopted standard established by the Unicode Consortium for encoding international character sets. Selecting Unicode encoding for your site will allow you to accommodate nearly any language in the future.
- Clearly separate code from translatable text. Be careful to not hard-code any text into your code making it difficult to separate out for translation. Use templates that call text from language-specific files.
- Create your content in good, straightforward English. Of course this is not always possible, as with marketing sites for highly stylized products or services, but to the degree it is possible, keeping it simple will be rewarded later with lower costs and better translation quality. Be aware that colloquialisms, idioms, humor and ethnic or cultural references are difficult and costly to translate and may not be relevant to people of other cultures.
- Keep your terminology consistent throughout the site. This is especially important if there are content contributors from multiple departments. In general, it is best to use industry-standard terminology, rather than internal jargon and less commonly known acronyms. However, companies sometimes need to invent terms and jargon, like blogging and Podcasts. In that case, just be sure to identify those terms ahead of time, decide how you intend to handle them in other languages, and let your translators know that in your glossary.
- Minimize text that is built into graphics. Text should be accessible and easily extracted. Embedding text into graphics may look great but it adds time and expense to the localization process. Rather than embedding text in a graphic, consider using navigation text in bigger and bolder fonts within your HTML code, which produces a similar effect to a graphic-bound navigation but is easier to localize.
- Use layered graphics. If is it not feasible to keep text out of graphics, be sure to use design tools like Photoshop that allow you to isolate text into a separate layer from any background image. Be sure to leave sufficient space in your graphics to allow for text expansion. And, you’ll want to make those original creation files (.psd, .ai, etc.) available to your LSP at localization time rather than any flattened images stored as GIFs and JPGs.
- Keep your graphics in special folders. Keeping your graphic files separated away from HTML files will allow for easy analysis and localization.
- Make it easier to localize your Flash files. If your website is Flash based, consider building Flash files so that their source text comes from a separate .txt file with a unique name. In this way, the reference to that English .txt file can be replaced with a reference to the localized .txt file, and the localized text will display in the Flash file without incident. This is a more localization-friendly production method than inputting text directly into the Flash file. You’ll find additional tips for localizing flash at these links:
- Use dynamic resizing to allow for text expansion. Rather than hard-coding the dimensions of your windows, tabs, panes, etc., allow them to resize dynamically and account for text expansion. (Remember that most languages need at least 30% more space than English.) If you can’t allow elements to resize dynamically, be sure to pad them out with more space to allow for this expansion. This is an absolute must when you have tables with numerous cells and buttons, and sometimes for short sentences like company slogans. Also, some languages, including most Asian languages, require more space because they need a larger font size (min. 12 pt.).
- Avoid fancy fonts. Choose fonts wisely. Although some fancy fonts may look good in English, they may not be reproducible for other languages, especially those from Asia.
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