Adapting the non-verbal elements of a website to
become truly multilingual
1. Intro
This report is the public version of the results report of the preparatory action:
Multilingual Digital Culture Website project, aka MuDiCu. It deals on how to
localise websites and other software applications devoted to digital culture in the
following six EU languages: Catalan, English, French, German Italian, and
Spanish. These reports contains the general theoretical results and its companion
includes practical hints for localizers interested to also adapt the non verbal
elements of their websites.
This result is based on an on-line questionnaire and interviews to dozens of
experts from both the European Union and the United States.
2. What does the average digital culture surfer looks for?
From the data obtained through on-line and live interviews, seems like there are
three common things which users look after: content, innovation and "coolness".
Both users and experts agree in that digital culture has to be innovative. They
look for original websites, based on state of the art technology which takes the
technology, the art and the content a little bit further: something unusual and
very creative.
However, being just innovative is not enough. Digital culture has to be "cool" as
well: it has to look modern, appealing, in touch with both the technical
innovation and the main avant-garde and leading movements nowadays.
And, last but not least: the content has to be interesting, there has to be
appealing images, sound, music, icons and navigation.
These are the main three things we have to look for if we want to create a
website or software application devoted to digital culture that really attracts
people. Trying to fit these three main aspects while localising to the six
languages under study is explained in the following sections.
3. The web exposure effect
It is sad to say that in our globalised - and let us say - "Usa-ficated" World of
digital culture it is very difficult to find astonishing linguistic specificities in the
look and feel of a web or a software application. Big things like background
colours and images or icons are so established and even stereotyped as to
become nearly impossible to find any cultural or linguistic difference there.
However, our study clearly show -against the observations of some critics- that
there are important differences between the way the users want the look and
feel of a website displayed. And these differences are based in cultural and
linguistic dependencies.
After some preliminary studies based on data from on-line questionnaires and
experts live interviews, we have established a simple yet powerful hypothesis to
explain the differences among countries. It is what we call "the web exposure
effect".
The concept is simple: Because of a combination of historical and technological
facts, some countries are more familiar with the web than others. We are talking
of course, about average. Even if Spain is the less "exposed" to the web country
among our targeted languages, it is clear than there are some people in Spain
which are as Net-savvy as the UK surfers, even better than the average.
This is clear, and has been observed and considered by localizers when
developing technical aspects of a website. Speed connection or text length are
the best known. If you want to create a Catalan version of your website you have
also to consider that they have an average slower speed connection so it is a
good idea to have smaller images and animations. If you want to translate a CDROM from English to French do keep in mind that the translated French take will
take more Kb than the original English one.
However, as our study clearly show, the look and feel that the users prefer on a
website or software application also depends on the web exposure effect.
Again, the idea is simple: the more a country/culture is exposed to web, the
more experimental or non-obvious ways of presenting information can be used.
As a practical result it implies that if you are working on a version for a country
with less "web exposure", for example, Spain, it is wiser to make clear, simple
and classic web design. When you are working for an English version, with
greater web exposure, you can be more original and innovative, without worrying
of not being understood.
It is not difficult to see why. A person which has spend a long time in the web
has seen a lot of "normal" website sites: Navigation in one window, frame
structure, white background, links from page to page, and is probably tired of
watching the same stuff over and over again. If it is a person looking for digital
culture content, he/she wants to see something exciting, different, so if you use
check boxes instead of links, present a radial structure of the information and
use more than one window to display the information this person will be a lot
more excited with the WebPages and will enjoy them a lot more.
Conversely, if a person is not that expert in the internet, and even has some
trouble with some abstract structures, this person will certainly prefer well
established structures like frames and links -which are still somewhat new to
them- than an experimental website which is very difficult to navigate for
him/her.
This result clearly shows two main things:
i) What is innovative is not universal, but depends on how much the country in
average, has been under a web exposure.
ii) Innovation needs to be in equilibrium with usability. This again depends on the
web exposure effect: the less familiar a country is with the web, the less
innovative and more usable the website has to be.
How to decide "how exposed" a culture/country is? After discussing with several
experts and checking bibliography, we postulated the following five principles:
1) The more a country/culture is worried about the speed connection, the less
exposed it is.
2) The more the users prefer frames, the less exposed they are.
3) The more users who think links are the best way to structure navigation, the
less exposed their country is.
4) The more references the users make to "digital culture" personalities the more
exposed their country is.
5) The more a country prefers more than one window to depict information, the
more exposed their users are.
It is quite easy to understand the importance of the principles and why we
choose them. In 1) we are taking into account the general telecommunications
structure of the country. It is quite obvious that a country that has a poor
infrastructure with slow Internet connections is going to be a lot less exposed ceteris paribus- than a country with better connections.
2) Is a way to consider the spatial infrastructure of the web, how innovative it is.
Frames where very popular some time ago, but their influence is quickly fading.
The more a country feels comfortable with frames, the less exposed it is.
3) Is the equivalent of 2), but this time looking at how information is structured,
and not spatial distribution in the web. Links were the more primitive way to
connect information in a web application, so the more popular the link is, the less
exposed the country.
4) Is also pretty straightforward. The more internal references you know about
the web, the more exposed you are.
5) Is the more radical principle establishes. So many years of the book and
television metaphors to develop software and even websites, plus the physical
fact that, after all, you usually have only one screen in your computer, has made
a very common fact to put all the information in one window. Therefore, if the
users start to get tired of this one window metaphor and prefer to switch
between windows and even to have several windows at the same time, this is a
clear indication that they are going beyond the usual metaphors and looking for
something really new.
Unfortunately, the on-line questionnaires established that every language prefer
all the information in one window, but different percents in how many people
preferred one window or multiple windows helped also to decide which countries
were more exposed.
4. The designer exposure
However, this principle does not explain all the culture/linguistic differences
observed in our study. Preferences of colour do not depend on how exposed you
are to the web, and they do vary between language and language. Also,
variations in content preference (information which people look in the web,
music, design tendencies) do not depend only on web exposure.
To explain that, we postulate another effect, "the Designer exposure". As has
been stated in cognitive psychology studies, what people usually like depends on
how exposed they have been to different stimulus and which were the emotions
related to those. If, during a considerable time, you've been exposed to bright
colours and minimalist arrangement of elements in the space, when you go to
the web, it is quite likely that this is what you are going to like most.
A couple of examples, obtained from our study will clarify this:
In a Spanish speaking city like Madrid alternative rock seem to be the "coolest"
music among people interested in digital culture. However, Barcelona -a bilingual
place where also Catalan is spoken- techno and other types of electronica are the
main choice. It is not surprising to see that Catalan speaking users do prefer
techno music while Spanish ones go for alternative rock.
Italy has a very active cyberpunk scene. Since the eighties, the concept of
"innovative", "cool" and "communication technology" has been strongly
connected to the cyberpunk type of Science-Fiction (Think of William Gibson's
Neuromancer or industrial music like Front 242). This phenomenon did not take
place in the other countries under study. It is not surprising, therefore, that
Italian people do enjoy cyberpunk style and themes in the Internet, while the
users from other countries do not seem to be interested at all in that.
In a subtler way, this happens also when design of interfaces and the use of
colour and the distribution of elements in space are considered. If the way
magazines, TV programs, books, posters, flyers, exhibitions and other elements
in the graphic design space have an specific style, and they are "cool" in a
country, it is normal that users from that country interested in cool design will
look for the "what's cool on my place" also when they surf the Internet.
5. How to make the best multilingual website devoted to digital
culture
Basically you have to pay attention to the three elements described in section 2:
innovation, coolness and adapted content.
Coolness depend vastly on the "designer exposure effect" an effect that we only
have detected, and summarised the more documented data. Also a second
edition of MuDiCu will help to establish these elements with more detail and
usefulness.
Finally, innovation lies mostly in the web exposure effect: the more you are used
to the web, the more experimental a website devoted to digital culture has to be.
We believe that the main elements that make a website, from this innovation
point of view have been more or less established in this preparatory action.
6. Elements under study
We have identified the following non-textual elements which are key for the
development of a website and other digital interfaces:
Navigation type: Which means if the user prefers text messages to guide the
navigation or icons.
Icons: Those small images which guide the users to surf the website.
General complexity of the structure: How experimental is the way elements
are depicted and combined.
Usability: How clear the navigation is, if the elements are located in the page so
they are easy to understand, if the page is clear, if it doesn't take too much time
to download… As the word says: how useful is the page indeed.
Weight of media objects: Which is the recommendable average weight of
images, sounds, and video…
Radial structure vs. Frame structure: As said in section 3, this is one of the
main characteristics we look for to decide the web exposure in a language. We
check whether the users prefer the classical frame arrangement in front of a
more innovative radial one.
Type of link: The way information items are associated in a web page or a
software interface. We have considered the following three main types: check
boxes, links, and pop-up menus.
Colours: That means the general use of colours in a web page/interface, and
how they are combined, whether in the background, in the text, to mark some
elements…
Background music: Music that is displayed while the user surfs the web page.
Banners: Small images that are clickable and take you to another webpage.
They are the virtual equivalent of ads.
Types of images: the visual elements that are used to ornate the
webpage/interface and make more interesting and amusing to the user. We
considered three main types: abstract patterns, nature and photorealistic.
Navigational animations: Whether users think that use of animations to
establish how to navigate the site/use the interface is worth or not.
Background images: Ornamental images displayed in the background to make
the site more "cool", amusing, interesting…
Language identifiers: What type of element should be used to establish that if
you click there, you'll access a website in a specific language. We thought of
three basic ways of identifying the language: text tags, cultural icons or flags.
Of the following list, one element is clearly universal and does not depend on
linguistic/cultural context, most depend to some degree on linguistic content,
and one does depend, but does not seem like a good idea to make it linguistically
dependent. These results, plus an applied model to each language under study is
proprietary information and belongs to the confidential version of MuDiCu report.
However, people interested in how to apply MuDiCu results for the creation or
real websites can read the other public report: "Do's and Don'ts while localising a
website", also in this website.
Do's and Don'ts while localising a cultural
website.
Do's
1. Be respectful with the language.
A meaningful number of web developers and content providers think that being
understood is the only problem you face when localising a web to a foreign
language. Sometimes they even use machine translation to produce a very
rough document, which is full of mistakes and sometimes is even asyntactic but
"can be understood".
Without being that dry, it is unfortunately very common to see websites where
particularities of the languages have not been considered: special characters
like "ñ", "ä" "à" "ç" "ß" and many others are not properly shown or only shown
if using some specific hardware/software (i.e. special characters are shown if
you use a combination of Windows + Explorer, but not if you are using
Windows and Netscape, and it gets even worse if you use Mac or Linux instead
of PC…).
From the on-line questionnaires and the live interviews it is clear that public get
upset and even angry if they see a website which is not properly translated,
contains semantic, grammatical or even orthographic mistakes, or lacks special
characters. Spanish and German are the audiences more easily annoyed with
those sort of bad translations.
Plus, all the experts agreed that automatic machine translation is still a too
embryonic technology to trust. Even the Spanish journal El Periodico, which
uses automatic translation from Spanish to Catalan and vice versa, have
translators and language experts to check the translations. And we are talking
about a very specific and expensive software developed just for this newspaper.
The moral is easy: always have a native speaker to check the translation and be
sure to use a technology that renders special characters no matter the software
and hardware used. Almost all web developers and programmers agree that the
most powerful and easiest solutions is Unicode, which is implemented in all the
platforms and can deliver any type or special characters (even from nonEuropean languages such as Chinese or Japanese).
2. Pay attention to bandwidth.
A webpage, which works perfectly in the UK, can be a disaster in Spanish just
because of the bandwidth. Not every country has the same speed connections
to the Internet, and people may get bored of waiting and leave your webpage if
the wait is too long. This is specially important in the beginning of the page,
when the users still don't know much about what's going on to it is quite easy
for them to leave the webpage.
Therefore, check the average speed of the targeted country and try to use
lighter images, sounds and animations, especially in the intro.
3. Take into consideration the web exposure effect.
Localising goes far beyond translating. Remember that not every user in every
country has the same familiarity with Internet and the web. The less "web
exposure" the country has, the more "normal" the web should be. A page that
is a killer among the Finish can be very difficult to understand in Greece, just
because they are not so familiar with the Internet and do not get how to
navigate properly. The rule of thumb is easy: the less familiar with the Internet,
the more normal the web should look like. The more familiar with the Internet,
the more experimental your website has to be.
4. Always use universal icons without connotations.
Taking into consideration the opinions of credited web analysts and our own
on-line questionnaires, it is clear that users prefer and understand universal
icons. Moreover, there is a general predilection with some non-familiar icons
(like the shopping bag for "shopping") clearly trans-cultural. Icons are the best
item for universal websites. Avoid local symbols and icons and go for universal
ones instead.
5. Make extra space.
A text that in English takes 7 Kb may turn out 15 Kb when translated into
Spanish. If you are using voice instead of text the difference will get bigger and
bigger. When developing an on-line application or a website be sure you'll have
extra space in case that the translated text or voice is a lot bigger than the
original ones.
6. Respect linguistic minorities.
A big deal of content providers and localisators only go for the main languages,
and do not consider smaller ones. This is especially true when the users are
bilingual and besides having as a mother language a minoritary one, in his/her
country a major language is also very common. For example, very few content
providers try to translate their webpages to Catalan, because they know that,
after all, every Catalan speaker is fluent either in French or Spanish.
However, there is more in language than just communication and content.
People also have feelings about their own languages, and they certainly prefer
to be addressed in their own mother tongue, even if they are fluent in other
majoritary language. It is certainly not mandatory, but a content provider will
get more traffic and interest if makes the effort to translate the content to
minoritary languages.
Don'ts
1. Avoid icons and symbols to depict languages.
It is incredibly common to use flags or other cultural icons in the beginning of a
website to choose among languages. However, this can annoy lots of users and
some of them can get so angry as to leave the website. When the EU is
considered, in only one country -Iceland- the linguistic and the political frontiers
do coincide. In other countries we have several languages among one country
(think of Catalan, Euskara, Galego and Spanish in Spain; Flemish and French in
Belgium…) or a language that is spoken in more than one country (French in
France, Belgium, Luxembourg; German in Germany and Austria…). That means
that a Basque can have a bad reaction while watching a Spanish flag in a
website or that a Belgian user may get angry if a French flag is used to depict
the French language.
The so-called cultural icons do not help much, because despite they represent a
language they usually belong to a specific country as well. The Tour Eiffel can
certainly be used to depict the French culture, but lots of people will think also
of the country France and even of Paris. The novel "El Quixote" is certainly a
symbol of the Spanish culture, but again people in Latin America may observe
that "El Quixote" and Cervantes are after all, a symbol of the country Spain.
The only cultural symbols that do not have any sort of political connotations are
the linguistic ones. That explains the success of the letter "ñ" to symbolise the
Spanish language. However, this trick is difficult to expand. Other languages
like English or Italian do not have a special characters that could be used as
symbols. Even worse, some languages have the same special characters -for
example; French and Catalan do share the special character "ç". Finally, the
idea of special characters is not that popular in other languages, so a German
user could have lots of trouble to understand that the icon "ß" stands for
"German version of the site".
Fortunately, there is an easy solution: Use tags where the language is indicated
with words. Never translate the noun to your own language, but use the
original word in its own language. That is, to establish that if you click there
you'll get the Spanish version of the web do write "Español" and not "Spanish";
use "Deutsch" and not "German".
2. Do not take branding too far.
As we have stated in another section of this report, globalisation is making
digital content too uniform and boring. One of the main reasons is branding.
Content providers want to give the impression of a brand that is firm and
transcultural so they want all their websites to look alike. This is a clear mistake,
As stated in the on-line questionnaire, users do prefer a website where the look
and feel is also adapted to the language and culture. If a content provider is
smart, he/she can take advantage of this boring uniformity and develop cool
websites adapted to language and culture which will be a lot more successful
than the ones only obsessed with branding.
3. Do not get obsessed with bandwidth.
In the "Do's" section, paragraph 2, we asked you to pay attention to bandwidth.
However our studies show, and some experts also agree that, users can wait
even long periods of time to see something they really like (just think about
people waiting hours for a video or MP3 file to download to their machines).
That means, take bandwidth into consideration but don't get obsessed with it.
Once you have the users in there and they like what they see, they won't mind
waiting if the content is ok. That is, do not cut interesting content in the version
for one language just because in that country their average speed is quite poor.
Try to keep and equilibrium avoiding heavy flash animations that do not have
specific use besides ornament, but keep the good content in.
4. Forget about the background music.
Users are quite unanimous, and so are experts. Background music is something
that makes pages to take more time to download and can be very annoying.
Even if the users have fantastic connections, they may be bothered if a music
they never asked to hear is displayed while they surf a website. If you really
want to put background music, be sure that users can at least choose among
several options and that they can turn it off easily whenever they want to.
5. Banners are not a good idea.
No matter the speed connection or how exposed they are to the web, in every
country, it is a majority the people that either say they never click on banners
or just hate them. Probably in other types of webs it is a good idea, but at least
in cultural websites banners are not welcome. It is probably a good idea to
think of other ways of revenue if you plan to make a multilingual website
devoted to digital culture in the European Union.
6. Avoid canned solutions.
A multicultural website has to look different, and adapted to the cultural
idiosincrasies of the targeted language and culture. Do not forget the
"autocracy of PostScript": if you use canned solutions like plug-ins or programs
that automatically convert code from one version to the other you'll have very
uniform websites which won't appeal the multicultural user. Try always to
develop your own code and do not trust fast plug-in ways. Think of designing a
website something between drawning and programming.