BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR THE DESIGN OF MULTILINGUAL WEB SITES

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BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR THE DESIGN OF MULTILINGUAL WEB SITES
04 February 2002 - European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications GmbH (EURESCOM)

English dominates the Web. More than 80 per cent of the estimated 14 million Web sites are in English. But only 43 per cent of the over 400 million Internet users worldwide have English as their mother tongue. The number of non-English Internet users is expected to rise to 65 per cent in 2003.

'The monopoly of the English language in the Internet world will soon be over,' says Elisabeth den Os, who led the EURESCOM project BabelWeb, which was finished last year. Researchers from the Netherlands, France, UK, Italy and Portugal co-operated in this project. The work was based on the assumption that small businesses as well as large corporations have to be able to provide multilingual Web-based services. Research has shown that customers stay twice as long on Web sites in their native languages and buy three times as much. The demand for multilingual Web sites is therefore high, but designing them is difficult. BabelWeb developed best practice guidelines for designing multilingual Web sites. One of the basic recommendations is that multilingual features should be included in the planning of a Web site from the start. 'Changing a single-language Web site afterwards to a multilingual one would cause serious problems in the site's architecture,' explains EURESCOM project supervisor Valérie Blavette.

BabelWeb developed a three-tier structure for the architecture of multilingual Web sites. Level one is a relational database for the contents; level two the overall structure, in which the contents is organised, and level three the presentation of the multilingual contents on the users screen. A crucial point for the planning of multilingual Web sites is the translation of the contents. BabelWeb compared and evaluated translation databases, automatic translation and automatic summarisation. One of the results is that translation databases – used to support professional translators and Web site managers – could lead to cost savings in the area of 20 per cent. Though Automatic translation and summarisation offer some advantages as well, they deliver not yet completely satisfying translation quality and require a high level of expertise for implementation.

Valérie Blavette is convinced: 'We have made an important step to overcoming language barriers and bringing people all over the world closer together. But there is still a lot to explore before we will achieve an easy to implement, fully automated design of multilingual Web sites.'

http://www.eurescom.de

About: European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications GmbH (EURESCOM)
Eurescom is the leading European organisation for collaborative R&D in telecommunications. It provides management of research projects and programmes for member companies and other clients. Companies who wish to collaborate on the key issues facing the telecoms industry are welcome to join the Eurescom community.

The EU Framework Programme has two main strategic objectives: strengthening the scientific and technological bases of industry and encouraging its international competitiveness while promoting research activities in support of other EU policies. EU FP6 website: http://fp6.cordis.lu/fp6/home.cfm

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