Pitfalls of Internationalizing Websites

November 12, 2003

I recently went through the process of moving a site from a static and U.S. centric audience to a global user experience, which required designing navigation systems and translating content for multiple languages.

The effort was a first for the company and myself. The project really awakened my understanding of the complexities involved in sucessessfully managing the internationalization of content and creation of a multdimensional IA.

We broke up our approach into several phases, with the bulk of the strategy and global stakeholder alignment done up front as we defined the user experience. As we started development, we started to comprehend how the effort of gathering assets (content, localized, graphics, and identification of local content) was multiplied with local versions in at least 2 languages per country.

This process also provided a rude awakening to the need to have content authors that can not only write in the local language for any given country on a global website, but can write well. Moreover, a having a distributed publishing model in place via a content management system would have also made things easier.

A recent article by Gerry McGovern (pop-up) really brought my experience home in his discussion about some of the big pitfalls (pop-up) with developing content on a global and localized bases for any website. His main argument is that a truly international site, whether a corporate/investor focused site or a ecommerce site, relies on well written content by folks that understand how to write content for the web. The complexities of being successful is only magnified by the number of languages a site is translated into. So, if you can't do local content at all, Gerry argues, you shouldn't do it at all.

The article is well worth the read. (pop-up)