[Sigia-l] Re: Question on multilingual sites

[Wendy Painter]

> Here's a personal anecdote: I was planning a trip 
> to France and searching for hotels online. My 
> French is basic, at best, and I was so relieved to 
> see a button or link in English that was directing 
> me to the English version of something. I was less 
> pleased to see French buttons or links directing me 
> to the English version.  I kept thinking, don't 
> they realize that I'm looking for English because 
> my French is so poor? They're providing English 
> content, and they ought to direct me to it in 
> English.

I think there is a basic assumption out there that
most speakers of Latin-based languages can guess, well
enough, which button means "English version" even when
it's in French, Spanish, etc.  (I won't back up this
assumption; it's simply something I've noticed
anecdotally.)  

But let's go one step further and talk about languages
that don't even share the same basic character set. I
recently visited a site that was completely in
Japanese, mostly text, displayed in a character set I
had no hope of deciphering.  The ONLY thing I could
make out on the entire page was the button that said
"English".  I clicked it, and voila, I got the content
I needed.

I also hit a page in Norwegian a few weeks ago, but
I'm not familiar with the Norwegian word for
"English", so I had to sort of guess which link would
bring up the English version.  Luckily I found it
rather quickly, but still, I'm not sure why the
designers wanted me to play "Guess Which Link You
Need" rather than just helping me out and throwing me
a bone/clue.

Whenever I'm faced with this sort of argument, I
always argue first, the user's comfort level.  It's
tempting to assume that "most people" can figure out
which button will bring up their native language
version.  But why should we introduce even a small
amount of discomfort or guesswork into their
experience, when it would be just as easy for us to
present the same information in their native language?
 It makes no sense to have a page that's "internally
consistent" (all in one language) if the person
reading it becomes baffled and eventually frustrated
trying to find a version they can easily understand.  

Wendy Painter
Austin, TX


	
		
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