10 Best Practices while defining a Globalization strategy for Web Portals

Organizations often develop country portals in silos. Each country/region may have its own IT department, which develops websites that cater to that region’s needs. While this provides a good customized solution catering to a specific country/region’s requirements, the branding and user experience across these various sites for the same corporation becomes very inconsistent. Many organizations have realized this and are actively developing a globalization strategy to create an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform for multi-lingual and multi-cultural business requirements.

Based on my experience working with various global enterprises, I’m jotting down some of the best practices that many organizations typically miss out while developing a globalization strategy.

1. 1. Categorize content – global, regional and local
   Categorizing content into these types not only helps identify content that needs to be published globally versus locally, but also it provides category-specific security, personalization, workflows, etc. during content creation and presentation.
2. Establish globalization success metrics
   Defining metrics around globalized content allows companies to validate the success of the global website. Defining metrics such as ‘number of visitors / page views / etc. for each international site’ would enable country administrators or content creators to improve the quality of content. If the translations are being done by third-party firms or by translation engines, metrics such as ‘number of translation errors’ can help the organization evaluate these vendors and improve translation memories.
3. Define user experience strategy
   Understanding user experiences is important for any Web portal and is critical for a global website. Developing a global (and local – if necessary) brand guide, style guide, UI guide, navigation guide, etc. can help make user experience seamless and consistent.
4. Simplify translation workflows
   While defining translation workflows, organizations tend to overcomplicate, causing creation delays and alternate content flows. The objective should be to keep it as simple as possible. Managing it within 3-4 steps would be optimal.
5. Define publishing guides for different countries
   Publishing needs may differ from country to country. While some prefer to publish all translated content at once, others may publish the parent content (say English article) first and then the other translated content later. Publishing guidelines around the publishing processes and dependencies provides transparency and clarity for all content creators.
6. Test translated pages on multiple browsers
   It’s a common mistake that IT departments test only English pages on multiple browsers, but not other languages. Since different browsers have different capabilities, there is a need to make sure content in all languages appear appropriately in different browsers before going live.
7. Plan for multi-lingual site search
   Search, a key component of any portal, needs to cater to multiple languages. Making sure that the search engines provide support for multiple languages is a key. At times, organizations may also want to enable search of documents / Web pages in other languages too. Make sure that translation architecture, defined for the global website, supports that.
8. Understand usage of color
   Color represents different aspects in different countries. While the color ‘red’ represents ‘happiness’ in China, it represents ‘death’ in Egypt and ‘anger’ in Japan. Understanding these differences can help use the right color themes for the same pages on different country sites.
9. Plan for right-to-left content display
   The portal needs to account for displaying content (such as Arabic) on right to left basis. The portal page template needs to ensure this is appropriately accounted for.
10. Develop guidelines for translation providers
    Irrespective of who does the translation, at an organization level, there is a need to provide guidelines for translation. For example, words that can’t be translated, specified translations for certain terms, tone of translation, messaging during translation, etc needs to documented and clearly conveyed to translators. Some of these can be taken care of by Translation Terminologies/ Dictionaries, Translation Memories, etc, if automated translation is being done.

Some of these best practices can not only be taken as the basis during development of a portal, but also can be used during Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor selection and translation vendor selection activities. As content published on portals becomes more complex (such as videos, RIA, etc.), the underlying design for the multi-lingual portals needs to be well architected and of robust built.

If there are other best practices that you know of, please do share them with us.