Building an international site focusing on interface and layout

Question

Dear Stackoverflow,

I've been asked to research what the best practices are when building the international version of your site.

The main question being asked of me is how we handle Chinese and Arabic.

For example, when the user selects Arabic as a language, should only text be right aligned or should our nav, logo and general layout also switch around?

When comparing to other large corporations, Apple and IBM don't change their layout but Microsoft switches almost everything around.

My good friend Google hasn't been much help so I was hoping someone here could help me out. Does anybody have answers? Some tips and/or resources?

Thanks

Answer 1

This guy has a raft of information. Beyond that, my problem is that I'm used to helping people do this via a multi-day consultation, and I'm not sure how to summarize into a post that fits here. That really isn't our business any more, so, honestly, I'm not shilling for work.

Answer 2

As ever in UI design, "it depends."

In this case the things you want to check include:

• What kind of users are you expecting? What technical level?
• What Web experience are they used to?
• What resources do you have for the localisation?

Technical users (e.g. developers) will most likely prefer the same layout on the site as other content.

For Arabic, while Web-savvy users are reasonably familar with left-to-right usage, it feels "wrong" and so your site will need to be quite compelling to make sure people stay. If you can change your layout then do.

For both Arabic and Chinese there are many customs and idioms that are quite different, especially when it comes to graphic design. Popular sites in particular look much "noisier" than is usual in the West: a site like stackoverflow.com would be very minimalist in these cultures.

Similarly be careful with things like lucky and unlucky numbers, colours with traditional associations, and suchlike. (This naturally goes everywhere: I could mention the comments we had from Northern Ireland about a very orange-branded theme that was once chosen for a site I worked on...)

What I'd recommend is that you allocate some of your translation budget to a local native-speaking UI consultant. They'd be able to give you proper advice on what bits of your site need to be localised as well as translated.

Answer 3

This is a very broad topic, but you did mention that Microsoft "switches everything around," so I'll talk a little about that.

There are a few components to supporting many cultures with your application. Some of the considerations might be:

• According to the W3C, internationalization refers to preparing your application for other cultures by removing hard-coded strings and making other kinds of resources, like images, localizable. This should be part of your software design/build/test process from the beginning.

• Localization can be broken down into two specific areas:

  • Language localization is the focus of most international software. Strings and images are converted to another language and loaded dynamically using the current culture.
  • Cultural localization (something for which Microsoft is famous) is the practice of changing UI elements to better-fit other cultures. For example, in the US, red implies an error or unfavorable message. In other countries, this is not always the case.

For software to genuinely be cross-cultural, you need to address both types of localization. For your web site, though, it's probably sufficient to localize the language strings and images as appropriate; you probably don't have the resources to have user interaction designers working on laying out your application for different cultures.