Translatable Webpages

One of the key features of internationalized applications today is making templates easy to translate and internationalize. In this paper I will try to provide some tips that should help you in that area.

Images are hard to translate

One of the most tedious jobs in translating a website is translating text written on images (like graphic buttons). They require the translater to have experience and a licensed copy of the image software used to design the images. Not to mention that some image design packages might not support the target language. In one case, I had to translate a web application that used a lot of graphical buttons designed in a new version of a popular graphics design software. As the it was just released, it did not have Arabic support yet. So that web application was practically untranslatable until the company released the Arabic edition of the software.

To overcome this problem, you should never have any text in an image in your design. Instead, design plain graphical buttons, then add the text later using CSS or a similar technique. This will also save you bandwidth, make your pages load faster, and allow easier maintainence. Also remember not to make your images direction biased.

Some words are really wordy

Sometimes pages are designed haveing in mind that a certain word or phrase of a certain size will fit in a certain place of the design. This might not stay true after traslation.

The word "here" in Arabic, for example, is a three letter word that looks very short when written. In one web application I was translating, the word "here" was used a lot to denote a hyperlink to another page (e.g.: click here to go to the next page). As the default style for that page was to not underline hyperlinks and just show them with a color that was very close to the standard text color, it was very hard to notice that the word was clickable.

On the other side, the Arabic language is not that much with acronyms. A word like CAT scan for example would span into Computerized Axial Tomography Scan. Imagine trying to translate a page that uses the word "CAT scan" in an image of a fixed size.

Don't depend on capital letters

Many languages doesn't have the concept of capital letters. Therefore, you should make sure that your website doesn't depend on having them. Some websites use them as design elements, which make them untranslatable without changing the layout.

You ever heared about wiki? Wiki is a method to write web content quickly and collaboratively. In wiki, each page has a unique wiki name. A wiki name is multiple words concatenated together, with each word of them being capitalized (e.g.: RecentChanges, InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas). These wiki names are used extensively in the content to make cross references between pages. The software will automatically identifiy this pattern of concatenated capitalized words and use them to create the cross links. This system, however, can never be used in an Arabic website, as there is no such thing as capital letters.

Accounting for gender differences

He is for males, she for females. Him for a male, her for a female. That's about all the gender differences in English. In Arabic, however, every word in the language have a different forms depending on whether it is refering to a male or a female. The word. The expression "Thank you", for example, differs when said to a male than to a female.

A dynamic mechanism can be used to displays the right word depending on the gender of the visitor.

Accounting for number (singular vs. plural)

This is also easy to achieve in English. When you are mentioning the number of days for example, you can say "1 day", when it is a single day, or "23 days" if it is more than one. If it is a dynamic application, you can just add an "s" to the word if the quantity is more than one or you can use the common writing form, "day(s)".

This is much more complicated in Arabic. Even native Arabic speakers can frequently make mistakes in these grammer rules. Studying the possibilities and creating a system that chooses the right one is something interesting but is byond the scope of this paper.

As this problem is not easy to solve, you can try to try to avoid it by using alternative expressions. You can try to provide the information in a more systematic way instead of trying to incorporate it in a sentence. For example, if you are trying to say "3 day(s)", you can write it as: "Days: 3". In this way, it will not look awkward when the number of days is one. Using this method, the word "days" can be translated to an Arabic counterpart that will look very acceptable, regardless of the number of days you put. You can also use tables, for example, to provide the same information.