multiple languages on websites - issues. mw2009 unconference session

Issues about offering users other languages than English on websites
(Note there is a video link at the bottom of this - in Swedish)

Unconference session
Thursday 16 April

Kerry Barrow, House of Commons, Ottowa Canada
Marika Jonson, Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, Sweden
Andrew Lewis, V&A, London UK
Liz Neely, Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Experiences
•French/English - because Canada is bilingual, (it is the law to provide both)
•Swedish with small English section - because it is International language
•English with detailed Chinese section, and limited (visitor info) in 8 languages
•English only - not yet tackled this

Why use other languages?
•To reach non-English speakers (or in most web content READERS of non-English languages)
•To be internationally known (global reach)
•To be more frendly to tourists
•To include local ethnic communities
•It may be a legal requirenment
•Business sense (reaching new markets)

FACT - Providing other languages requires more resources - staff and/or cost, so how do you prioritise?
•Obtain buy-in and lead from senior management
•Why do you want languages, what is the objective?
•How many languages do you think you need, and why
•Which ones are most important
•Which ones are easiest to get translated (e.g. who locally has the knowledge, are the type faces easy to get up)

What barriers are there, and what potential problems can exist?
•The workload of offering multiple languages is higher, so how can this be funded.  More money or reducing other work.
•The cost of updating needs to be
•Quality control. How do you know it is saying what you think it does?!
•Lead time between translations.  When you update the English, how quickly do the oterh languages change

Some possible solutions
•Videoing native speakers may offer a quick way to get information up (service info or user generated content)
•It may be possible to pay for a translation service (V&A Chinese site)
•It may be possible to offer automated systems (this was felt not to be very useful, but it may be possible to get bulk translation done this way, with a final shorter cost in human quality control, rather than all-human translation)
•a User wiki or other user generated content option that allows web visitors to translate your pages (would still need QA, but may be cheaper and may be able to engage local speakers
•What comparative research is there on languages on the web?
•Who does it well already?
•Get local community to help
•Group together to pay for a translation service to be created (a pan-museum grant assisted project perhaps?)
•International translation (we do each others)
•Grant funding for development/cultural diplomacy may get it started, but workflow needs to be embedded for ongoing maintenance
• It was felt that business websites may have some solutions

Technical issues
•How does a change in one language filter out to the other languages?  Needs a clear workflow/business model, and organisational committment and resource
•Autosystems - e.g. BabelFish(do these really work?)
•CMS workflow, can alerts be set up to the translation services when content is changed.  can this be set up for only pages which are translated

Summary

•before embarking, it is important to be clear about the reasons for doing so
•A business model needs to be created based on the cost of the alternative ways this can be done against achieving these objectives
•this needs to be have senior management commitment, incuding lead and funds
•It was felt that there are probably many examples of working sites out there
•a comparative summary of museum sites that already use multiple languages and how they work would be a useful future MOTW topic

watch the video and see how annoying it is if you can understand the language, but how quick it is to get a video up!

http://tr.im/j2Wt