In theory, the worldwide web opens up your business, blog or personal website to an audience spanning the entire globe. In practice, creating a site that is both accessible and appealing to viewers from different cultures is not quite so simple. The casual surfer in the UK might be under the impression that the internet is written largely in English, but that’s because language recognition systems will direct you to sites in your language.
In reality, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population speak English as their first language, so if you have the capability and want to appeal to more than a fraction of the world’s population then you’ll need to build sites that can communicate across cultures.
While English flows from left to right, some languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese) are written from right to left, which can lead to problems with navigation bars. Vertical bars are usually located on the left of the page for left to right (LTR) language websites but, while it may be possible to simply transfer the bar to the right-hand side, it’s simpler and adds greater continuity to use a horizontal navigation bar from the start.
Colours can be important in website design, helping to set a tone and reinforce a theme. You must be aware that the same colours can have different connotations and meanings from one culture to another. Orange has links to royalty and patriotism in the Netherlands and is a popular colour, whereas in Northern Ireland it’s associated with Protestantism and may serve to alienate part of the target audience. Similarly, white has connotations of peace and marriage in many western cultures, but signifies death and mourning in much of Asia, this underlines the importance of knowing your target market to avoid making a cultural faux pas.
Studies have also identified significant differences in the ways in which information is processed by ‘high context’ and ‘low context’ cultures. Viewers from high context cultures (such as India and China) have a tendency to view the site as a whole and take information from context, whereas low context cultures (Western Europe, the USA) look for explicit information.
It’s not always easy to address or recognise this difference in website design but, at the most basic level, think of an intuitive and interactive design in favour of rigidly structured and presented written information.
Investing in a top-level domain with a country code for each of your target markets (for example .es for Spain or .cz for the Czech Republic) might be more expensive, but it will boost your rankings with local search engines and on the country-specific rankings of major players like Google and Yahoo!.
Making sure they are hosted on a server in the target country will also boost rankings and will prevent viewers from being misdirected via geolocation. Geolocation can identify a viewer’s location by checking the country in which their IP address is registered, and will then channel them to the appropriate page. As many IP addresses are physically hosted in a different country, this can lead to surfers being routed to the wrong page. If you have a country-specific domain hosted on a server in that country, that page is the one that will show on any localised search.
The simplest and cheapest option for translating the language of your content is to add a translation widget such as Google Translate or Microsoft Translator to your website, which will allow visitors to translate your content into the language of their choice. This negates the need for any major redesign of an existing website, but even the best machine translation tools are likely to throw up contextual mistakes and often it completely changes the meaning of your text.
If your budget allows, this is by far the better option. A native speaking translator will interpret your content and ensure it actually makes sense and flows, rather than mechanically translating it word for word, helping to retain all of the meanings and nuances and avoiding any embarrassing linguistic or cultural errors.
