What is multi-lingual web site?

Over the past year, the number of multi-linguals web sites has increased, machine translation tools have been integrated into web browsers and multi-language support in common web publishing platforms has improved.

When you create a multi-lingual web site it’s not just the content that you need to translate.

Throughout April I’ll be publishing a series of articles looking at the approaches to and implications of creating a multilingual web site.

One Coke Can Using All Three Benelux Domain Names

I came across this Coke can the other day and noticed that they were combining 3 country endings (TLDs) of the company’s website onto one line.

.be for Belgium, .lu for Luxembourg and .nl for the Netherlands.

I’m not sure why they’ve opted for the layout that they have used, lumping Belgium and Luxembourg together like that in a rather odd way. I guess if they’d done it alphabetically, they would have put the Netherlands, the largest of the 3 markets, at the bottom and that might have been deemed unacceptable.

Incidentally, the .be site offered French and Dutch as language options, the .nl was, not surprisingly in Dutch and the Luxembourg site was in French, but offered a “change language” button which takes visitors to the Belgian site.

The .lu site had no Luxembourgish (not surprising really), but no German either which I had expected.

Ah the complexities of doing business in the Benelux region.