Website Localization – 7 Ways to Enhance your Multilingual Website User Experience

As a representative of your brand, the first people thing notice about your business is your website. They may not mind you not having an office in their region, but if the first-hand impression of your website isn’t up to the mark, you may end up losing an opportunity, much before you pitch for it.

Yes, websites and website experience have become as critical in the modern-day business environment. Hence, you cannot ignore their significance and put for your business to risk.

Website experience, regardless of whether you’ve got a unilingual website or a multilingual one, is crucial to the success of your business. It encourages the user to stay on your website for a longer time, explore it well, and thus increase the chances of contacting you or making an online purchase.

However, with multilingual websites, you must stay extra careful, and align it with your user expectations through the incorporation of some significant factors.

Delivering a multilingual website user experience helps you win the user’s trust, and stand a better chance of converting the prospect into a consumer. So, let us look at seven ways that will help you improve your multilingual website user experience.

How to Improve User Experience of Multilingual Website

1. Increasing your Website Loading Speed

The journey of user experience begins from and depends on how quickly your website loads. The quicker your website loads, the longer you retain the user.

But, with multilingual websites, loading speed plays an even significant role and is a complex task to deal with. Why? It is because of the average internet speed that varies from country to country.

For instance, according to Ceoworld Magazine, the average internet speed in Taiwan is 85.02 Mbps. In Japan, it is 42.77 Mbps. On the other hand, the average internet speed in Venezuela is around 1.37 Mbps, and in Mexico, it is 6.02 Mbps.

Interestingly, these speeds also determine the patience levels of your users. A Venezuelan may have more patience while waiting for a website to load than that of Taiwanese, who is habitual to the highest internet speed in the world. So, a Venezuelan may not mind waiting for a few seconds for your website to load, but a longer wait time may frustrate a Taiwanese and he may leave your site.

Hence, before you launch your website in the target region, you must know the average internet speed and fine-tune your website, its design, layout, graphics, images, text, etc. to match the average loading speed of the country. It is the first step towards delivering fantastic user experience.

2. The Ease of Language Selection

Another significant factor that contributes to user experience is the ease of selecting languages on your website. As a multilingual website, and as someone who has invested in localization, you must simplify language selection broken down by the type for your users.

For instance, your website must give separate options for British English and American English to increase the content comfort of your users.

Similarly, you should have French options based on the French-speaking country that you target. For example, your website should have a separate option in the language menu for the native French, and the West African or the North African French.

Your multilingual website must offer your users the option to choose their language written in the script they use. For example, as a native French, you may not want to visit an Arabic site that writes French as فرنسي and vice versa. It is because if you don’t read Arabic, you will not be able to recognize the script, and will have to scroll down through the language menu to search for your language.

Besides, a lot of users reach various webpages on your website through different searches. In such a situation, if your website directs the visitors to its homepage when they select the language of their choice, they will seldom make the efforts to go back to the localized version of the webpage they have initially been searching.

Now, that ruins the user experience, as your website, in the first place, makes visitors run here and there to search for their language, and then also compels them to make efforts to go to the webpage they intend to visit. It eventually reduces the chances of conversions as well.

3. Localized Layout of the Website

Every language is unique from the viewpoint of grammar, sentence structures, length of the words, alphabets, etc. Besides, a lot of languages use different types of scripts. For example, the Arabic script is different from that of CJK ( Chinese , Japanese and Korean ), Devanagari, Gurumukhi, and others.

So, the website layout that fits for English may not necessarily work with Arabic , owing to differences in the style of writing, the alphabets, sentence structure, word length, and many such factors. But then, that doesn’t refer to the same layout while dealing with languages using the same script.

For instance, the German or French way of forming sentences is different from that of English , although the script of these languages is the same.

Your website must incorporate these changes, as, if it doesn’t, the webpage layout, and the webpage in entirety, will look unnatural, and either cluttered or elongated. The user will not have the delightful content experience, and will most probably hit the close button!

The use of flexible web design and layout proves useful in this regard. It allows your content within the page elements to align with the text size based on the language involved. As a result, your website, with every language that it offers, delivers a consistent user experience throughout.

4. Choosing the Appropriate Font Sizes

Using the same font doesn’t necessarily keep the appearance of languages the same. For instance, Chinese characters are taller than the English text, but then, they convey the same message in a lesser number of characters than the one you may require to do so in English.

A webpage with a font that is either too small, or proves a misfit in the localized context is likely to dissuade users from the website, and which isn’t a great sign for your business. The solution to it is to specify readable font sizes for all your localized webpages that correspond well in regards to the way they display a particular language in a specific font.

So, before your launch your website, or a localized webpage, ensure that the font is readable, and it does not look appropriate or causes inconveniences while reading.

5. Using White Space Wisely

Often, a lot of website owners try and use as much webpage real estate as possible to optimize the use of the webpage space. They do so to accommodate advertisements, images, graphics, etc. within that space. However, overusing the white space may prove a turnoff for your users as then the page looks cluttered and deliberately overused to fit many elements into one page.

Using white space wisely and appropriately is necessary to deliver an impeccable user experience. It is because white space increases the legibility of your content, and also allow your user to look at the elements that surround the text.

Besides, it also increases user attention up to 20% and makes your website look fresh, clean, and open. The key is to strike a balance between the content volume, and the white space on the site, to ensure unmatched user experience.

6. Translating Text in Images

Your website localization must offer a seamless user experience, and to the extent that your users don’t visibly make out that the website is translated into their language from another.

However, most of the times, it doesn’t happen. While website owners ensure localization of every single element on the website, they often leave the image text untranslated. It is because image text doesn’t translate automatically and hence requires exclusive translation efforts.

One way to avoid it is not to embed text in images, or using SVG files for the graphics. SVGs can support localized/ translated, editable, and indexable for search engine optimization.

7. Incorporate the Appropriate Date and Time Variations across the Globe

Date and time formats vary from country to country. For instance, the US and the UK follow the 12-hour clock. But, a lot of European countries, France, for example, use the 24-hour clock. So, while localizing your website in France, remember you won’t have AM and PM.

Besides time, the data formats as well differ. In the United States, they follow the month/day/ year order, while in the United Kingdom, the date format they use is date/month/year.

Localization involves detailing to these extents so that nowhere does the users feel that they are dealing with something unusual, or something which they aren’t aware of.

Partner with Filose for an Incredible Multilingual Website User Experience

Filose is an experienced, versatile, and expert localization partner. The company has been working in the localization industry for over a decade and continues to deliver results for its clients across various business domains. Filose has the necessary localization experience, linguistic expertise, and domain knowledge to help you offer a genuinely captivating user experience to your regional users.

Filose’s proficiency at over 100 Indian and foreign languages, and its extensive set of resources, right from translators, localization experts to web designers, and developers help you leverage a comprehensive set of localization services for your business expansion endeavors.contact to Filose’s experts on +91-20-49007800 or email to sales@filose.com

Ref. No – FLB06221014