How many languages can you keep up?
Every language in the menu is a promise. The portal of ompp.org (opens in a new tab), the site we built for OMPP · WOFP in 2005, offers six languages. Four have content: Spanish, English, Italian and French. The other two, Portuguese and German, currently lead to a page that doesn’t exist.
Even among the four live languages, the size varies: there are more than 200 pages in Spanish and fewer than 120 in French. A smaller language version isn’t a problem in itself. It becomes one when visitors don’t know it and land on an empty page, or in another language with no warning.
Our rule: a language goes into the menu when someone is going to look after it. If it will carry less content than the main one, decide up front what happens when a page doesn’t exist in that language.
One URL per language
There are two common ways to handle languages. One gives every version its own address. The other keeps a single address and switches language with a parameter, a cookie or a script. The second is simpler to build, but Google recommends the first (opens in a new tab): it asks for different URLs for each language, and warns that if the language depends on cookies or browser settings, it may not find every version.
There’s an even simpler reason than search: a link someone copies and sends to a colleague should open in the language they read it in.
On the International Medical Committee site, each language has its own addresses, written in that language: /es/medicina-de-desastres/ and /en/disaster-medicine/. Every page points to its counterpart in the other language, so search engines show each person the right version.
Translate the structure, not just the copy
A half-translated site shows at the edges: a menu in one language and URLs in another, or search snippets that were never translated. Menus, breadcrumbs, image alt text, page titles and meta descriptions are all content too, and they belong in every language.
The organization’s name is part of the structure as well. The ompp.org portal shows the name in French, Spanish, Italian and English before the visitor chooses, so everyone recognizes the organization in their own language before going in.
What we don’t do is redirect people automatically by country or browser language. Google advises against it, and it takes the choice away from the visitor. A visible language switcher that leads to the same page in the other language does the same job and lets people decide.
Write for each language
A literal translation is understandable, but it shows. On this very site, the English version was written for English readers. Titles and descriptions aren’t translations of the Spanish ones, and some sentences change completely because they work differently in English.
When an organization works with communities in several languages, every version is somebody’s first impression. It’s worth treating it that way.
What we check before launch
- Every language in the menu has real content behind it.
- Every page has its own URL and declares its equivalents in the other languages.
- The language switcher leads to the equivalent page, not the home page.
- Titles, descriptions and alt text exist in every language.
- Nothing redirects based on country or browser language alone.
If your organization’s website needs to speak more than one language, these decisions come before design. They’re part of how we approach web design and development, and the full OMPP · WOFP story is in its case study.