Wwohn.com : How to lead visitors to translations

Sometimes you run across multi-language sites that offers links to different translations of the website. Although providing for these hyperlinks may seem easier than making the translations, the hyperlinks themselves need some attention to get the best result. Below you will find a summary of some pointers to leading your visitor to translations of your website.

Use the language of the country in question
If using written text in your hyperlinks, make sure that you use the language of the country in question. So use “Francais” instead of “French”, use “Deutsch” instead of “German”. The translations are intended to help the visitors who end up on a webpage they do not understand. Lead them to their own language in their own language. A good example is sedo.com. This website offers hyperlinks to several languages such as deutsch, espanol and francais.
Put the hyperlinks at the top of every page
Make sure that a visitors immediately finds the hyperlinks to versions in a different language. If a visitor does not understand the webpage, he or she may try and find a translation or move away to another website. If you look at the homepage of Mercedes you will note that the hyperlinks to German and English are hidden in the footer.
Put the hyperlinks on all pages
Visitors may find your website through referring websites or search engines. As you know, these traffic sources do not necessarily point to your homepage. Make sure that every page of your website contains the hyperlinks to translations you offer.
Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are webpages that are shown prior to the homepage and can be used to show a flash animation or to have the visitor choose a language. Such a page is a non-informative page that denies you the opportunity to utilize the power of a good homepage. Even worse, it may result in visitors leaving your website before they even see the content of it.Please visit the homepage of BMX for an example of such a splash page. Also note the option “all other countries” at the bottom of the drop down menu. For some reason I expected a list of more countries. However, it provides an English page to suit the rest of the world. Being from the Netherlands, I speak a non-supported language, it felt like being a second hand visitor.
Use the HTTP header accept-Language
This header communicates the preferred language of the user to the server of the visited website. Use this information and change the default language into the language taken up in this HTTP header. Note that some users do not adjust the language setting and some browsers do not support this option.
Do not mix up country and language
Especially the use of country flags can be confusing. Imagine a user from the UK visiting a webpage looking for an English version. When seeing the USA flag, the British user may ignore this flag since he is not looking to buy something in the USA, but actually is looking for the UK version of the website. Tradedoubler provides the option to choose a country and language. You can choose “United Kingdom/ English” which indicates that the website is country specific.
It is ok to refer to translations of a single page
Not everybody is willing to translate an entire website in many languages. I can imagine having a Dutch website with a few pages in English such as press releases and contact information. The following line would be sufficient: “This press release is also available in English”. It is not perfect but an acceptable cost-efficient alternative, as long as you do not include sitewide hyperlinks that promise a translation of the website.
Be consistent
If you decide not to settle for translating some press releases but would like to translate the entire site, make sure that you actually translate all pages of your website. Especially if you use content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress you may have also used (English) template designs. If you do not properly translate those templates your visitor could end up with pages in English regardless of the selected language.