The internet is global, and if your company or your company’s website reaches out to all the corners, mulit-language support is required. There are several techniques into supporting multi-language sites, but the one problem I repeatedly find is lack of quality control.

Don’t Stop Half Way

If you are supporting multiple languages on your site, don’t give up half way by showing just tiny little flag icons where a visitor may not even see them, and don’t do it in a way that could confuse the visitor either. Pretend they don’t understand your default. Make it obvious, and make it clear. It amazes me how many site owners invest so much into supporting a second language on their site, but then fail to support a menu to help visitors find the second language site.

Quality Control

Here is an example of an air gages site, that at first impression tackled the issue head on with big icons, and supporting text. The problem was, they sent a confusing message with duplicate icons for different languages. I can only see that as a big “Oops!”, and that there has been no real quality control on the site yet. The home page uses Canada’s flag to represent English, and Canada’s flag to represent French. Yes, both are spoke there, but that is not a normal way to represent those languages.

It was great that this site made it clear they supported multiple languages from their home page, and that they supported the icons with text. If the flags were all red we would still know what language click because of the text representation that supported it. It was just unfortunate of the mistaken flags. Before you cry out “Stupid”, check your own site. These guys were not the first to make a mistake like that, I guarantee.

Support it Site Wide

Now here is the opportunity to use those tiny little flags icons. When you have determined the users primary language using a method such as the gage site has done, don’t quit supporting it. If you were to dig into the site a little, support for multiple languages is lost. Imagine if you came from a search engine looking for gages, and landed here: functional gages. You are missing out on a customer if they don’t speak English. All that money wasted on multi-language support. You could have, you did the work, you paid for the service, but you failed to tell he visitor. Ouch.

If it’s a worthwhile investment to support multiple languages on the site, then take the time to make it clear that you do, and make it clear on what means what by using obvious icons or text. This is something that is often done just half way, and it could be killing many opportunities for you.