Developing Website for Users of Languages Other Than English
1:42 PM
FT World
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Today, the
Internet is positioned to be an international mechanism for communication and
information exchange, the precursor of a global information superhighway. For
this vision to be realized, one important requirement is to enable all languages
to be technically available via the Internet, so that when a society is ready to
absorb Internet technology, the language capability comes prepackaged. This is a
nontrivial multilingual-information processing problem. To appreciate the extent
of this issue, it is enough to know that few years ago, English was the native
language of 80% of web users. Today, English is the mother tongue of less than
half of web users. However, statistics show that the language of about 80% of
web sites is English with only about 8% could be classified as multilingual
From the
numbers above, making a website universally usable is an important issue and
ignoring it may lead to groups of users suffering isolation, rather than
enjoying the true interoperability alluded to by the very name of the World Wide
Web. However designing websites in languages other than English or multilingual
websites confronts designers with many requirements. These requirements
generally fall into three categories: data representation, data display and data
input requirements . This paper studies these requirements,
gives general recommendations for meeting them and provides a list of guidelines
for web pages designers. It also gives examples of successful websites
implemented in different languages.
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