[Sigia-l] Switching between Spanish and English

[Grant Bacon]

Hello,

Im working on putting a Spanish language front end 
on a major DSL portal.

Not everything will be in Spanish, because of technical
limitations in some places (personal web space is operated by a third party
who cant convert their product in time for example) and some other
3rd party entertainment-type content.  Account tools and help cases
will be in Spanish.

Heres the question - the users will be messaged during signup
that not all content will be in Spanish, and as they click
through the site they will inevitably pass from Spanish to English
content.  How disjointed/unexpected. of a user experience is this?

My collegues think there needs to be tons of messaging/popups/etc
to warn users when going between languages, but I am assuming that 
there is somewhat of an expectation among Spanish speaking users (based on 
other portals theyve seen) that
not everything will be in Spanish (and they have been messaged as much during signup)

Im thinking that all we need to do is create a convention that sets the expectation
for the user (e.g. Spanish hyperlinked text goes to Spanish content, English
hypelinked text goes to English content - or even "en Espanol" or "en Ingles"
in parentheses after the hyperlinked text)

Any thoughts around this you'd like to share?  BTW - the language setting is global
and  not a page by page switch - sub-accounts can have different language setting.
Also, another assumption is that we should keep all content whether Spanish or English,
instead of creating a smaller Spanish subsite with less content. (assumption is
most users will know at least some English and appreciate the fuller site)

Best, 
Grant Bacon



		
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