Designing the relationship between content and locales

My series of posts on international information architecture:
  1. Translating taxonomies and categories
  2. Translating categories, translating terms
  3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
  4. Designing the relationship between content and locales (this post)
  5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
  6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate.
I am trying to gather thoughts on the various structures and patterns that occur when creating multiple versions of a website in multiple locales. I hope to create a model, a way of thinking about these structures that can help when making decisions about things like:
  • What content should be translated?
  • From which website to which website?
We can come up with many models (models schmodels), the question is: is this a useful one? Does it aid your thinking? This is early work, so any feedback (shoot it down!) is greatly appreciated. Let's get started. When you are creating versions of a website in multiple locales, the simplest case is when you just translate everything on the website. One on one translation. You start with a master locale, and just translate it into another locale. This is rare though – very few translation projects are this simple. One on one translation. The second, more common case is selective translation: you have a master locale (often English), and other locales are partially translated. Selective translation. There are various types of selective translation: you can do a summation, where multiple pages or whole sections of the master website are replaced by just one page in the translated version. Or you can just not translate parts of the website: removal. Most projects do a bit of both. A third case is when you have a master locale, but also original content in the translated locale: original content. Original content The original content in the translated language can be used as a master for translation into yet another language. For example, your master locale is English-US, the translated locales are English-Canadian and French-Canadian. (French is an official language in Canada, and there are certain legal requirements to provide information in both official languages.) You might have a partial original content translation from English-US to English-Canadian, in other words, you take parts of the English-US content, and create parts of the content for English-Canadian from scratch. Then you might do a one-on-one translation from English-Canadian to French-Canadian. This example can be described as a grouping locales. Many countries or regions have legal requirements (and human needs) to provide content in various official languages. If you have an intranet in Canada, you must provide content in French even if you only have 1 employee in Montreal who speaks French. In Belgium, you should provide content in French and Dutch, since half the country speaks French and the other half Dutch. If your locale is South-America, you better provide content in both Spanish and Portuguese, and maybe a few other languages as well. When you are creating your content-locale structure, grouping locales often makes sense, in that a certain locale can become the master of all local languages, like in our Canadian example.The content needed for this group of locales is the same or very close. Finally, sometimes almost no content is directly shared. In this case, we're just talking about separate websites. It is a valid option, but I won't discuss it in much depth here. So, to recap, we have 4 simple ways to connect locales:
  • One-on-one translation
  • Selective translation (summation and removal)
  • Original content
  • Grouping of locales.
These structures can help us design the relationship between content and locales for our websites. When you start designing the relationship between content and locales, you'll often find that the structure you come up with is different for different types of content. Technical support information may be translatable directly in a one-on-one translation. You might not sell exactly the same products or services in all markets, so marketing content might require a partial original content translation. And so on. So here is an example of how you might design the relationship between content and locales for a public product website. We are distinguishing a few different content types, and for each content type we provide different relationships. | | | |
# Jan 12, 2005
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