[Sigia-l] Question on multilingual sites

[Cho, Jason]

Is the link contextual, or part of the sitewide navigation?

If the former, I tend to agree with you. A sentence which reads "The article, which is also available <in German>" is much more natural than "The article, which is also available <auf Deutsch>." But if it's a matter of the whole article appearing in the other language and being linked as "normal" rather than "extraordinary" content I tend to agree with your colleague. Were the situation different, should I need to know that the Malay word for English is Inggeris, or that the transliterated Polish would be Angielski? By extension, why should I expect transliteration over simply Английский  or  انگليسي ? 

The other common methods of indicating language-- flags or other national representations, and abbreviations-- have their own problems. I don't imagine the Irish enjoy being sent to the Union Jack, or that denizens of Hong Kong cybercafes know offhand that "zh" is the ISO-639 Chinese counterpart to "en."

While your case is mixed content rather than language "silos," I don't think the concerns are especially different. How would a non-anglophone Dari or Ukranian speaker would even know their languages are offered by http://www.dw-world.de/ ? The approach taken by http://www.chosun.com/ ,  http://www.rbc.com/ , http://www.unil.ch/ and others seems better.

-Jason C
-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf Of Jan Knight
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:13 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: [Sigia-l] Question on multilingual sites


Hi:
I'm having a bit of a "discussion" with someone on how to identify pages 
of web sites that are in different languages.

Are there standards for the following or does anyone have comments - 
anecdotal even?

If a site has primarily English content but also has some content in 
Spanish dotted around, my take is that everything on the English 
interface should ALL be in English. Now, I'm not talking about a site 
where there is an entire translated equivalent site, just one where some 
pages or articles are also provided in Spainish.

I think that if you're in the English interface you should see a link 
that says "In Spanish" rather than say "en Espanol."   Therefore, if 
you're in the Spanish side, you should see a link that says "En Ingles 
(or whatever the correct term is :-).  

My colleague says it's ok to have "en espanol"  as the title of the link 
even in the English page. He and I disagree obviously.

Any resources or opinions would be appreciated, even if they do not 
support my side of the discussion.

Thanks so much.
Jan

-- 
Jan Knight, MA
Senior Research Specialist
Learning Technologies Center
Computer Center # 337
1077 N. Highland Ave.
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
520-626-7761
mailto: jknight at email.arizona.edu


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