Managing Multilingual Content
If you have a website, chances are you use a content management system to maintain, develop and update it – and it is probably doing a pretty good job of fulfilling your needs.
But you can’t assume that your trusty CMS will be quite as reliable once you start throwing multiple languages into the mix. Managing multilingual content online has several additional challenges, including:
Centralisation
Whether you have 2 or 25 language sites, you need to be able to manage them from one location. They might include some different content, and might be running across numerous domains, but it’s essential that you are able to maintain consistency and share resources across all your sites.
The single location also enables you to effectively manage the internal linking between your different language sites, as well as the geo-selection tool.
Local Hosting
You may or may not have local hosting as part of your international strategy, however it is advisable to ensure that
Character sets
Most languages use at least some “special characters”, such as accents and many languages, like Russian and Chinese, use totally different character sets to English. Unless you are happy seeing an array of odd symbols scattered throughout your copy, you need to ensure your CMS has the correct coding to manage multiple character sets – UTF8 or “Unicode” is the best for multilingual sites and should resolve most issues.
Changing Content
Content changes – that’s a fact. It might not be happening daily or monthly, but it will happen and often with little notice. If you are going to venture into the multilingual world, it’s essential that you have the tools and the processes in place to help you manage additions and changes as accurately and efficiently as possible.
