Communicating in wide range of languages (and with a wide range of budgets)

A global world demands adaptation by organizations with culturally and nationally diverse audiences. Depending on your organizations’ budget, you may choose one of two approaches: a pre-developed widget to be configured and installed on your site, or a custom-coded solution developed specifically to fit your organization’s needs. At Illuminati, we’ve taken both approaches with different clients to match on the scope of their projects.

For a few of our clients, including The Closing Company and Girl Scout Council of Tropical Florida, we’ve implemented Google’s Translate widget. Girl Scout Council needed an easy-to-use tool allowing users to switch between English and Spanish, so the drop-down only allows switching between English and Spanish.  For The Closing Company, some extra customization was involved to change the translate drop-down into a row of flags for several different language options. Google’s translation algorithm is surprisingly robust, relying on something called statistical machine translation rather than checking against two sets of grammar rules and dictionaries; it uses statistical models of a large database of bilingual texts to find the best translation for any given set of words.

For Vision Research, a high-speed camera manufacturer, we developed a completely custom tool to help Vision distribute changes to content to microsites in multiple languages. Any content updates made to the English microsite are noted in other language microsites; content managers for each of those microsites are notified on where to make changes. The multi-language microsites also include a dictionary tool for the content manager that helps assist with common translations for things like form fields, warning messages, welcome messages and more.

You can check out some of the different sites mentioned above at these links:

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