Handling Multilingual Sites for Humans and Search Engines

I was being too harsh because I travel a lot live in a different country languages and have a shared computer at home. There are times it would be more nice to be part of the majority are personally get a bit upset when websites are trying to guess and then force languages on me without asking and letting me confirm or deny.

Thanks for the great info we think that Google boats are easily fetched the data and content rather than the code level.

Indeed you make a good point regarding conversions, as ultimately that is the goal of every website and if something negatively affects that, it should be removed or not implemented.

As you said before, you cannot please everybody, should go for the majority and then it is just too bad for people like me.

Many times it is nice to be a different individual, but there are times it would be more nice to be part of the majority…

You are very welcome and your disagreement too!
I understand your frustration having to deal with sites not handling preferences according to your situation.

The logic you suggest is pretty “polite” with user but:
– In cases I’ve worked on where the screen asking for preferences has been removed conversions increased.
– It is not going to solve the public usage issue

A complete different, and interesting story, would be UX best practices to make easy for users to guess how to change language in a site not in their language. I encourage you to make a study about.

What I don’t like about flags is in many cases a flag does not represent a language, Canada’s flag does not mean only English, it is French too.

Display “Español” and not “Spanish” I agree 100% with you.

Yes, so many details could compliment the article but unfortunately I have not all the time I would like to do it. Again, write about it, take it to the next level!

Alienate people who travel is what some border police makes sometimes when your skin is not pale white :(

Hi Ani,

thanks for the follow up.

Maybe it is just me and I was being too harsh, but because I travel a lot, live in a different language country and have a shared computer at home, I personally get a bit upset when websites are trying to guess and then force languages on me without asking and letting me confirm or deny. Extremely frustrating.

I do understand your basic logic and indeed in some cases it may be useful to use some sort of auto-guess language feature, but IMHO it definitely needs to be done differently then described here as some very important details were left out.

I would suggest the following.

– On first visit, detect browser language by means of your suggestion, show a screen stating that the website guessed “insert language”, with the following options:
— Yes, make default and never ask again
— Yes, but don’t make default and ask on repeat visits
— No, let them choose the correct language and ask for default language yes or no

Now comes, for me anyway, another very important part. You talked about the impossibility of personalization for shared computers, which is of course correct. But to make websites unusable for people on public/shared computers is a bit too much I would say, especially if it can be avoided.

I find that many websites, including MSN/Hotmail as one of the big ones, use TEXT for people to select a different language (and to top it off they have it displayed somewhere near the bottom right corner). This is a very, very big no no, as that makes sure that people who cannot read the language on the website, cannot change it into a language they can read, because the text would be something like “Verander Uw Taal” (Change Your Language in Dutch) and most people have no idea what that means and are therefore unable to change the language.

The far better way, IMHO, is to show either flags of the countries, including the flag of the country of the currently displayed language or list all languages in the header directly but then of course with the languages already translated into their alphabet, i.e. display “Español” and not “Spanish”. Many websites got that wrong, such as the Bidz website and it needs to fit into the design of the website. If it doesn’t fit into the design, then don’t implement the method.

Without those additions, the suggested method leaves out many important parts and is just not a very user-friendly way of doing things.

Indeed “never, ever” is not fitting with SEO in general, but I do think it is correct if talking about the specifics on how to implement the suggested method, as there are far better ways that don’t alienate people who travel, share computers or have multi-cultural relationships and still have all the advantages of the suggested method.

To further specify the problem, ALL people who use public and/or shared computers are effected in a very bad way, if it is done as suggested here.

To name a few:

– Internet cafe’s
– University/School computers
– Library computers
– Hotel computers
– Coffee shop computers
– Multi-cultural couples who share the same computer at home

I think it is hard to find any website on a subject that never receives any visitors using the above mentioned places. Meaning that the suggested method is at least extremely bad user experience (or sometimes even makes it impossible to use) for some of your readers.

I have to disagree completely with websites auto selecting languages.

To me it is very frustrating and should never, ever be done automatically.

Take my situation. I live in Thailand with my Thai wife and we both use the same computer and the computer was installed with Thai language.

What this means, is that whenever I, non-Thai reading, go to a website which auto selects language, I see Thai jibberish letters which don’t make any sense at all to me.

To make things even worse, is that there IS an option to select a different language on most websites, but of course it is in Thai, which I cannot read.

This happens every single time with for example MSN/Hotmail. My wife logs in with her account, which is set to Thai. When she is done, she logs out. When I go to MSN/Hotmail, it has remembered the Thai language and the “change language” section is in somewhere on the page in THAI. So that means that effectively I cannot use MSN/Hotmail anymore.

Of course now I know where to click, because she told me, but otherwise it would have been impossible for me.

Same goes for Google. Whenever she has logged into her Thai account, Google assumes that it should always display Thai.

NEVER, EVER auto select languages and keep them in memory to server next time, NEVER. It is just very bad behaviour of websites. IF, and a very big if, you want to have it set to memory, let users specify that. For example hotels.com does a good job at that, but almost every other website is just not friendly to people who use different languages on the same computer.

Of course I understand that my situation is a bit specific, but how many internet cafe’s do you know?

Since many different nationalities use the same computer on internet cafe’s, they have the exact same problem as me.

So PLEASE, never ever do auto-selecting language without user input and never ever commit the selected language to default without specific confirmation.

Please, it will make the web a much better place for anybody who uses internet cafe’s and are located in foreign countries with different nationalities.

The timing of this article couldn’t be better. Thanks for the great info Ani…especially the logic for determining what language to show. Great stuff!

Thanks a lot Nishant for your kind words, it is my pleasure.

Really nice post Ani.
I had a little confusion about getting a new domain for a different language, creating a subdomain or just a dir. Your post cleared my doubts.