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Designing Navigation for Multilingual Content Mistakes

Thinking of translating your web site? Are you looking for an experienced language service partner to share with you their knowledge of languages and cultures of the markets you wish to reach?

Wintranslation is a specialist in translating websites and adapting them for international markets. In addition to professional translating your content, we incorporate search engine optimization, usability testing and cultural adaptation techniques into our processes. The result is a multilingual site that maximizes traffic from search engines, generates a pleasant user experience and delivers real business results for you. Our presentations on web localization have been seen at major international events such as the Search Engine Strategies conferences and Ad-tech.

Did you know that in order to reach the Chinese market, you need to have both Simplified Mandarin Chinese (for China and Singapore) and Traditional Chinese (for Taiwan and Hong Kong)? Did you know that using national flags as multilingual content navigation is offensive? Did you know how to find out how people search for your products and services in their native languages?

We can help. Give us a call or send us a note using our quote request form so we can talk to you about your website translation needs.

Three Common Mistakes in Designing a Global Gateway

A well designed global gateway on your site leads your site visitors to the multilingual content in the shortest amount of time. The last thing you would want to do is to lose them because content is so hard to find or offend them because you are culturally insensitive. Below are three common mistakes people make when designing their global gateway.

Common mistake #1: using flags as navigation
The problem is, many countries often speak the same language. If you only use the flag of one country to represent a language, it may upset the readers from other countries that speak the same language.

For example, French is the official language for more than twenty countries including France, Belgium, Canada and many African countries which were once colonies of France. If only the flag of France is used, the Canadians are not going to be too happy.

The same applies to Chinese where it is spoken in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. With the ongoing political tension between China and Taiwan, it is a very bad practice to use Chinese flag to present content to other speakers of Chinese.

Common mistake #2: putting the navigation in a hard to find location
The point of a navigation is that it is easy to find and can take you where you need to go. Web experts often talk about “leveraging existing knowledge” by putting the navigation where most people would automatically look to find it. In site navigation, the top right corner is the most ideal place. Putting it anywhere else usually sends people scrambling to find it.

In the example below from the H & R Block web site, the Spanish navigation is way below fold so you cannot get to unless you scroll all the way down. Only the most determined readers who are aware that such Spanish content would know to look all the way down to find it. A much better place would be the top right corner, where people can easily see it without having to scroll.

Common mistake #3: Not using target language to indicate choices of language so people with little knowledge of English would have difficulties
In the example below, you can see the language navigation is written in English rather than the target language script (i.e. 中文for Chinese). If a reader has little or no knowledge of English, it is harder to navigate and find what he/she needs. So it is best to indicate the language choices using the translated words, rather than English.

To sum up, the best choice for multilingual content navigation should be in the target language and on the top right corner of the page – and avoid using flags!

Language names in their native script Below is a table of language names in their native script put together by the professional translators of wintranslation.com. It is not done by machine translation engines. It has been carefully checked. Please feel free to copy the text and use them.

Afrikaans
Afrikaans

Arabic
العربية

Bulgarian
Български

Catalan
Català

Simplified Chinese ( China)
简体中文

Traditional Chinese ( Hong Kong, Taiwan)
繁體中文

Czech
Česky

Danish
Dansk

Dutch
Nederlands

Farsi
فارسی

Finnish
Suomi

French
Français

German
Deutsch

Greek
Ελληνικά

Hebrew
עברית

Hindi
हिन्दी

Hungarian
Magyar

Italian
Italiano

Japanese
日本語

Korean
한국어

Latin
Latina

Lithuanian
Lietuvių

Polish
Polski

Portuguese
Português

Romanian
Rom ână

Russian
Русский

Spanish
Español

Swedish
Svenska

Tamil
தமிழ்

Thai
ไทย

Turkish
Türkçe

Ukrainian
Українська

Vietnamese
Tiếng Việt

Felicia Bratu is the operations manager of wintranslation, in charge of quality delivery and client satisfaction. As a veteran who has worked in many roles at the company since 2003, Felicia oversees almost every aspect of the company operations from recruitment to project management to localization engineering. She recently received certification as a Localization Project Manager as well as Post-Editing Certification for Machine Translation. Felicia holds a BSc. in Industrial Robotics from the University of Craiova, Romania.

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