This made me smile, but it highlights a point. It’s not just about internationalisation and translation. Localisation is important too.
Localisation, or should I say localization
It’s a screen shot from a list of features on the Woo Themes web site. Available in American and UK English.
Those translation articles are on their way …
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.
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.
Nowadays, it is very common for part of the content of a web site to have been created and published by someone other than the owner web site. For example, the content of many question and answer fora is almost exclusively created by the users themselves.
The volume of comments on the most popular newspapers and blogs will easily outstrip the word count of the original article written by the paid journalist. Any site owner can add continually updating streams of photographs and news to which others freely contribute and which appear on our Web sites automatically.
And then of course, there is online advertising. Placement of advertising used to be a very controlled. But since any web site owner can now publish adverts irrespective of the amount of readers they have, the number of sites carrying adverts has mushroomed. Now that anyone can carry ads, the whole process has been largely automated.
