Editing for International Audiences

May 2001

Many users of sustainable development Web sites do not speak English, French or Spanish as a first language. Writers, editors and Web developers should consider one of the following options for addressing the needs of multilingual audiences:

• offering fully bilingual or multilingual sites;
• providing basic information and summaries of key documents in more than one language; or
• taking care to use plain language and avoid the use of colloquialisms that may not be understood by second-language readers.

What is a multilingual Web site?

Basically defined, a multilingual Web site contains a mixture of:

• Global content, translated to many languages for worldwide use, and
• Local content, written directly in each language for the local market.

People talk about the World Wide Web. They talk about the global community. But the Web site most organizations launch is only in one default language: English.

If your audience is international and you're looking for the ability to tailor your message in the language of your customers, you need to address the language needs of your audiences. The material that is done up in the English language should be readily available in a generic format for the purpose of translations. Users may want:

• To search a multilingual collection by using queries in one language or to retrieve documents in a number of specific languages, preferably via an interface in the language of their choice.
• Some translation or summary in a language other than that of the document.
• Two-dimensioned information (i.e., at the global and regional scale of operation).
• Information in regional languages to facilitate better understanding.
• The content customized to meet their varied levels of literacy.
• Dynamic information, which is updated periodically.

Why is it important for the organization?

• The organization's mandate can reach new potential users without print media and associated costs (which is a separate issue by itself and treated in another section of this manual).
• As a communications solution, it can be scaled to any audience size and projected into any location at no extra cost.
• Rapidly changing content can be published and revised in many languages simultaneously without the need to manage an inventory of printed material for global distribution.
• If you already have a Web site in one language, then its content is already in digital form, organized for translation. It's simply a matter of delivering the files to a translation agency by e-mail or FTP. This unique characteristic of Web sites reduces turnaround and logistical problems for you the client, especially on highly interactive sites.
• The organization needs to be aware of its resource allocation and the additional costs which translations may incur.

For all of their benefits, multilingual Web sites also bring difficulties.

• The user interface
  To provide a bilingual interface seems to be the easiest part of providing multilingual support. Still some questions should be considered in relation to the language(s) of the interface and the choice for a mono- or multilingual interface. The expected language skills of the target audience will be of major importance.
  
  This will be easier to determine if the Web site wants to serve a well-defined language community rather then a broad heterogeneous audience. The staff will need to have the necessary skills to provide and maintain pages in more than one language. If not, there will be extra costs for external assistance, such as for a translation service. The content manager will have to balance the extra cost of creating and maintaining a multilingual interface with the potential benefit for the users.
  
  Example:
  an Internet portal for rural India – http://www.tarahaat.com has used a special user graphics-based and voice-interactive interface to address the issues of multilingualism at the local level.
  
  
• The mandate of the Web site
  The policy scope of a gateway/Web site outlines the subject areas and the types of resources covered by the gateway. This includes language and geographical parameters.
  
  To set parameters for a site the following questions could be asked:
• • Is there a need to include resources written in more than one language or in a selection of languages?
  • Will the service include documents that require the use of Unicode to support multiple languages and scripts in one single document?
    
    
• The choices made in this area directly determine the skills required of the staff responsible for selecting and/or cataloguing the resources, as well as the choice of relevant authoring and access tools and software.
  
  Creating a site that includes resources in a lot of languages requires input from a team mastering all of those languages among them. If a separate team does the cataloguing, they would also need extensive language skills. Not a lot of organizations will be able to manage such a broad coverage with an in-house team. A distributed model—as opposed to a centralized model, where the gateway is the responsibility of one organization—could offer a solution by getting input from a multinational team, located in various countries, providing their input via the WWW. In this case, a multilingual development framework needs to be implemented, based on standards in information retrieval and exchange.
  
  
• Data presentation and the backend
  A multilingual gateway would require the WWW software lying behind the gateway to cope with multilingual data handling, search, retrieval and display. Existing standards and recommendations provide a framework for multilingual support in data communications and in description formats and meta-data.
• • The HTTP protocol, on which the Web is based, includes information about the type of the transferred information and the character encoding for text-based information.
  • Based on the exchange of information between client (browser) and server (HTTP server) it is possible to provide character encoding and language negotiation.
    
    
• Cataloguing rules
  Do you include complete versions of the document, or do you also register parts of a site that are available in another language? A related issue is the problem of whether to create a separate record for each language version. For books this has been traditional practice; the translation of a book will get its own cataloguing record. For the Internet environment, it may be worthwhile to store information about different language versions in one record, as long as the fields relating to one version are linked in some way.
  
  
• Retrieval (for searching and browsing)
  It should be considered which multilingual browsing or search support can be offered in addition to the multilingual interface. For instance:
• • Is the classification scheme available in all languages of the interface, so the browsing structure can also be generated in those languages?
  • Does the classification scheme make sense in each language?
  • Does it need to be different and how would that affect accessibility?

Ideally subject-specific gateways should provide their users with the language support they need. In reality this will likely be restricted, depending on the available technologies, the language skills of staff involved in selection and cataloguing, and last but not least, cost considerations.