Translation
There is no medium besides the web, in which more people and information are meeting at this moment, with different languages and cultural backgrounds. This melting pot of language and culture is also a geographical reality on a continent like Europe.
The webmotive headquarters in Aachen for example lie in a tri-state-area, where the borders of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium meet. Again, in Belgium Flemish and French is spoken.
Providers of websites are faced with the decision to which degree the own site shall contain localization. Every option, welcoming a visitor in his native language, is a service to the customer. Other providers are officially obligated to design their site multilingual.
Multiple Languages as Design Components
While native translators transport the fine nuances of a language and culture, a multilingual website has to meet certain technical prerequisites for the differences between the offered language options.
Different languages have different characters and a change of reading direction is possible. The layout of a website, where content is read from left to right and from right to left, should be able to follow the switch dynamically.
The handling of addresses and paths for the various language options as well as the detection of language via browser information and IP ranges also have to be planned.
Translation at webmotive
webmotive offers translation services by native speakers within the scope of a development or editorial maintenance of websites. Our current portfolio includes German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Chinese.
All sites implemented by webmotive are ready for the utilization of any characters following the international Unicode standard. Other requirements with regard to language options are gathered beforehand and are realized individually.
Also being a hosting provider we can present you with different concepts for the access of multilingual areas of your site. For example via the top level domain: example.de and example.fr, or embedded in the paths of the site: example.com/de/ and example.com/fr/.
Summary
- Providers determine their site’s degree of localization
- Every language option is a service to the customer
- Differences between languages require technical prerequisites in addition to translation itself
