Opera at SXSW 2008

SXSW Panel: Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons

By John Jones. Monday, 10. March 2008, 16:05:47

localization, 2008, internationalization, translation, sxsw, design

My first panel of the day was Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons. This panel was put together and managed well; the chair by Stephanie Booth, a web consultant and commentator who blogs at Climb to the Stars. She began the panel by asking each panelist to describe his- or herself using three tags before beginning the session. Booth (cat, Judo, people) did a great job keeping the panelists on topic, and she worked hard at keeping the early morning crowd engaged with the discussion.

The first question the panel tackled was: what is localization and internationalization? According to Brian McConnell (author, inventor, prankster), the Founder of Worldwide Lexicon, localization is taking an app and redoing the interface for another language. Translation, on the other hand, typically refers to translating the text of a website itself. Interestingly, sometimes entirely different groups work on these two tasks in the same company. Google's Kevin Marks (bibliophile, English, eccentric) then pointed out that internationalization is making sure your website can be translated—that is, working on the backend and design of the site, making sure that your design doesn't make assumptions about the language and culture of the audience.

This turned out to be an important issue for all the panelists. Stephanie Troeth (Polyglot), Director of Interactive Technology & Solutions at CloudRaker, pointed out that German localization is difficult because words in that language are typically longer than their English counterparts, a fact which makes site layout difficult. Similarly, French phrases are typically longer than English phrases. According to her, it is important to make clients aware in the wireframing stage of their site design that they have to imagine the words that might be used in the design in other languages.

Another important issue brought up by the panelists was the issue of context. Kelly Thompson (tall, geeky, obsessed), Executive VP at iStockphoto, flatly stated that context is everything. Troeth echoed this sentiment, pointing out that localization is more than just translating what words mean, but also translating the concepts on a page as well. Thompson pointed out that at iStockPhoto, core concepts like "royalty-free" had no counterparts in some languages, a fact which made it much more difficult to localize the site.

This panel was a great way to begin the day: always on topic, the discussion moved briskly and all of the panelists made interesting contributions to the discussion.