Keeping up with the Joneses, Garcias, and Wongs - Three Ways to Keep your Multilingual Site up to Date

J. Freedom du Lac had an excellent article today in the Washington Post on Maryland Live!'s efforts to market to Asian players. In the article, Mr. du Lac mentions that the Maryland Live! Web site is translated into Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Being the inquisitive person that I am I had to take a look. I noticed some things that show just how difficult
multicultural marketing can be.




Here are a couple problems that I spotted from about 5 minutes poking around in source and so on:

• Text embedded in images and not translated
• A static hero image on translated pages, lacking the rotating image of promotions and events shown on the English page
• A navigational item on the Chinese menu that listed The Prime Rib restaurant as "Soon to be Opened". I ate there myself back in June.

Clear from the article is that Maryland Live! is investing a lot in hiring new staff and training existing staff to provide better service to a multicultural community. That the Web site is translated at all also speaks to that effort. 

But that communication effort cannot be translated once and left to go stale as the original English site is updated over time. Keeping the site up to date in multiple languages (and preparing content that is more readily translated) requires effort, but it need not be as complicated as the original site creation.

Just as Web Content Management systems exist to make updates easy, there are digital tools to help with multilingual content.

Here are some easy steps to implement to improve this process:

1. Avoid text as images - Produce digital content ready for reuse and avoid embedding text in images or producing text as images. Modern Web techniques make it much easier to layer text over images. If text must be embedded in an image, either keep the source layered image handy for ease of translation, or make the base image available without the text at all.
2. Keep the Multicultural marketing team alerted to changes in Web content - Larger teams like that for Maryland Live! often delegate multicultural marketing, meaning that team may be focused on specific efforts and separate from the Web content team. Make sure they are part of the workflow of new content, if only for notification. Use a service like ChangeDetection.com if you have to.
3. Keep an eye on translated content - Look over your translated site yourself once in a while to check for freshness. If you have trouble reading it, use freetranslation.com to translate text for you. Or use the native Chrome feature to use Google translate for whole pages. (Another thing to credit Maryland Live! with is their use of the lang attribute in their root HTML element on each page that enables just this kind of embedded translate feature to work).

There are certainly more sophisticated ways to do this, too. WorldServer by SDL is software made to help monitor content, includes translation workflow, and provides centralized translation memory so that content already translated is leveraged as much as possible to keep translation costs low.

But even before moving to that level of sophistication it is incumbent on the marketing team to keep content fresh and up to date, in all languages.