To design a multilingual website, it is necessary to consider many points and the methods of doing this also vary depending on the needs of the website owners. In general, a multilingual website can be defined in such a way that its content can be read and displayed in several different languages.
Due to the increasing spread of the Internet, many websites and companies want the content and services they offer to be read and used by foreigners who do not know English. These companies, which usually have international partners and are present in the global market, need to do their website design in a multilingual way.
For this purpose, if the second language in question is spelled the same as Persian – right to left – like Arabic, there will not be much problem, but if the second language is one of the Latin languages that is written left to right, then probably the most sensible way is to design the appearance layers of a multilingual website in two ways, right-aligned and left-aligned. Basically, right-to-left elements are called Right To Left, or RTL for short, and Left To Right, or LTR.
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Multilingual website design tips
To design a website that can be used in several different languages, there are points that may not seem very important at first, but based on years of study and experience, these seemingly simple points will have a great impact on attracting the audience and user of the website.
Start translating
This may not have anything to do with web design, but it does need to be addressed. First of all, you should know that using online translators such as Google Translate, which can quickly translate the entire text of the website, makes the work much easier but with less accuracy; Therefore, if you want to design a multilingual site professionally, before starting work, you need to translate and prepare all the content that you want to be displayed in other languages by professional translators.
Let the user choose the language himself
In many multilingual websites, even large websites, it is observed that using IP, the current location of the person who entered the site is determined and based on that, the language is selected automatically. For example, a person living in Germany automatically changes the language of Google settings to German when they log in to the Google site. For many, this is not a pleasant event; Because it may be a French-speaking person but has traveled to Germany and entered your website from there. So in most cases it is better to leave the choice of language to the user.
But if you want the language to change based on the location of the person as soon as the user enters the website, be sure to design the site in such a way that the user can easily see the language change option.