[Sigia-l] Switching between Spanish and English

[Cunliffe D J (Comp)]

Hello,

My own views on this are based around work on websites for Welsh/English
bilinguals where there are some similar issues.

To my mind "tons of messaging/popups/etc" are just going to be more of
an inconvenience and irritation to your Spanish speaking users. What you
need is a clear consistent convention to indicate whether a link leads
to Spanish or English content. The issue then is how to signify this.
Intuitively the idea of English hyperlink > English content and Spanish
hyperlink > Spanish content sounds reasonable. However this will depend
to some extent on the hyperlinks themselves. If your anchor text is say
using an English technical term, then your Spanish speaker might not
understand the link - even though they might well understand the gist of
the content if they followed the link. If your Spanish speaking users
don't understand a link in English, they may believe that the content
they seek is simply elsewhere on the site and spend effort trying to
locate it. On the other hand if your English language links are only
using common English words, this might be OK. 

Tagging the links either with text (Esp - Ing) or graphically (but NOT
with flags please!!) might be a more appropriate solution.

Do you have the option of taking your English links and doing some
testing with typical Spanish speaking users to see how comprehensible
they are?

I think you are right about a single integrated site - particularly if
your Spanish speakers have some English language ability. I think it is
also good "socially" for English speakers to see other languages as a
reminder of the multicultural/lingual communities that many of us live
in.

One thing you can usefully do once the site is live is to track the
behaviour of Spanish speakers to see which English language pages they
typically access. This then provides a good indication of which pages
should have Spanish version provided next. 

I hope these musing are of some small use to you.

Be seeing you,

Daniel.

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Grant Bacon
Sent: 11 Awst 2005 15:48
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Switching between Spanish and English

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