Multilingual Site
Since my wife was already running an off-line gallery, I wanted to build,
with her help, a site where artists could exhibit their work and sell it
on-line. My original goal was to make a site for English speaking art lovers
looking to buy Icelandic art. But we ended up with a bilingual site.
How did that happen?
My wife is not too fluent in writing English so she composed some site articles
first in Icelandic and then I translated them to English. Soon, I realized that
to use both our efforts best, we should have the same content in two languages.
Twice as many pages with only a little bit more work!
I find it easier to concentrate on one language when I begin to build a site.
The main focus should be on building quality CONTENT based on keyword research
and brainstorming. This is true for sites in all languages.
Brainstorming was a bit challenging when we first started. Icelandic language is
only spoken by a small number of people so I found very little information about
keywords being searched for locally. So we needed to research keywords a little
differently.
The approach I used was simply to guess at an Icelandic keyword that I imagined
would work. Interestingly, my Icelandic pages are found by Icelandic readers and
the pages come up with ranking less than 30 in the SE Headquarters!
When I am writing text for pages, I do each one in my own language first. Then I
translate that page right away. This makes my content flow better and it sounds
more natural.
To make it easier when you want to have an overview of your site's content,
prefix page names with the language abbreviation. For example, I put "is-" in
front of all Icelandic content pages. You could use "sp-" for Spanish or "fr-"
for French. That way all pages are listed together in the folder and you
immediately know which is which.
I use another strategy as well. If I make a page for an artist, I name the
English file with the full name of the artist and use "-isl" as the ending of
Icelandic pages. That way both files list close together.
European languages are given a lot of their flavor by the special odd-looking
characters used. These languages use the basic 26 characters of the English
language but add various others. You see the characters used in French, German,
Danish and many other languages as well. Most languages have their own defined
set.
Bilingual sites, therefore, usually need more characters than are available in
the English alphabet. Icelandic has 10 such special characters, but they are
still a part of the Latin character set. It is possible to write these
non-English characters in web pages using a special coding method. This tip is
outlined here...
http://sbitips.sitesell.com/non-eng-accents.html
Unfortunately, it is very time consuming to type every word with the special
HTML code. However, I find that you can simply write the characters directly
into an SBI! block and it will turn out well in any browser. On this page,
http://www.art-iceland.com/icelandic-characters.html, I use that method
successfully. You can even take a look at the source code (View > Source in IE).
This also works well for my other pages that I do in HTML.
There are a number of SBI! sites that use a language other than English, or are
bilingual. You will get some good ideas from their sites as well...
www.viennapianostudio.com (a brilliant use of flags to designate language
option)
www.spanish-translation-help.com
www.1001-fruits.com
www.i-perros.com
www.allesamerika.com
www.globalgeniussystem.com
If you are really serious about building a non-English site, you could consider
doing what the big guys do and build a site for each language. That way you can
have your keyword in your other language in the domain name. However, I find
that this is overkill.
A bilingual site is a good option. More content will never hurt you. Search
engines find content in all languages. As long as you are writing stuff that is
related to your theme, build it and they will come! Same goes for Google page
ranking. Links in from other sites in various languages will only add to your
value.
Thrandur Arnthorsson / Ţrándur
Arnţórsson
