Hello, tech-lovers. In this article, I will talk about serving your website or web application in multiple languages with locale configurations. My aim is to provide practical and easy-to-use information that will be useful to you. Then let's get started.

There is a concept called i18n in the web world. Maybe you've heard of it before. But for those of you who haven't heard, I'll open it. i18n = "internationalization". Even writing is difficult. Since there are 18 characters between the leading i and the last n, this word was converted to i18n. What it means is that your website or web application is served to users according to their native language. In other words, when a user from Turkey enters your site, your browser notifies your application and all location-specific information in the application is converted into Turkish or the format used by Turks. Ok, this is fairly simple. But, what are these localized things? This could be any information such as the language of your site, currencies on your site, local date and time information, and so on. It's a tremendous technology. But, It is not an easy thing to achieve, unfortunately. It is actually one of the hardest tasks in building a website. Let me list some of the practical information that you can benefit from.

1- Not all software frameworks may support this i18n feature. There are a lot of javascript frameworks out there. Some of the new frameworks may be preferred due to their good performance by your developers. You should definitely discuss this issue with your service provider before getting service. This feature is easier mostly in more established web technology systems. If you are going to have a multilingual application or website, definitely try to choose "old but gold" type systems. Although new systems have support in this regard, some annoying bugs and flaws may occur or it could be a little bit more difficult to implement. This will be of course an extra cost and frustration for you.

2- Translation of the content is not the only issue that you have to consider. Link URLs also need to be translated carefully. Websites, where the language change in URLs is only performed by language suffix change in URLs, are indeed worse than the ones where the whole URL is translated in terms of SEO. For example, if the contact link of your site is www.example.com/en/contact in English, its Turkish URL should be in the form of www.example.com/tr/iletisim. This is better in terms of SEO performance. Especially if you have a blog site and hence you have slugs for each page, you will see the benefit of this approach more.

3- While having your site to be built, don't ask your service provider for just multi-language support but ask more than that. Ask them for both multi-language support and localization. The display of the dates and the times in your website, currencies, special language characters (eg. ç, ş, ı, ö, etc. in Turkish) on your site will always be affected by this. These could cause minor errors, but if they are caught by your users, your site is labeled as unprofessional.

4- If you only provide services for a specific country, you can buy a domain with a specific extension implying that country. You will ultimately benefit from this, especially in terms of SEO. One example of that type of domain is www.example.com.tr. You can get the global domain without any extension. But note that in this combination, it will be difficult to manage these two different domains and to switch languages between each other. It won’t be smooth, unfortunately. 

5- Word lengths differ in every language. In some languages, some words can be very long. It is necessary to pay attention to this issue, especially in navigation menus, button names, and other elements where the character length can affect the user interface design. Either the lengths of the words you will use in different languages ​​should not be very different from each other, or the page element where you put these words should be able to absorb the length of the words. Otherwise, your page design is seen as clumsy, unfortunately.

6- Colors can have different meanings in different cultures. While localizing your site or application, you need to pay attention to this issue as well. Let me give you a striking example, while the color red generally means love, compassion, enthusiasm, excitement, and danger in European countries, it means prosperity, wealth, and success in China. It is good to know that this color, which is used to attract people’s attention especially in advertising campaigns in Europe, does not mean the same in far-east countries.

7- The most important issue to be considered is that while localizing the content of the website or your web application to different languages, you should not take the easy way out and surrender yourself to a tool such as Google Translate. There is no doubt that Google translate is a very handy translation tool. However, we still cannot say that its translations are always perfect in every pair of languages. It can still be understood very easily that a text is a Google translation, especially through out-of-context words. If your user notices this, they will see your site as unprofessional. Instead, if you are proficient in the language that you translated using Google Translate, you can have Google do the preliminary translation and then apply the method of correcting the wrong translations and misused words. Google is still not very good at capturing metaphors and idioms, especially in some languages, and can make serious mistakes. It is useful to pay attention to this. If you do not have proficiency in the targeted language to be translated, let the expert handle it, but you should definitely check it or have it checked out. Make sure you don't make the mistakes mentioned above.

There are many points that need to be taken care of in this regard, but it is not possible to describe them all in this article. I hope we will continue to touch on different points in future posts. We all know very well that there are no borders in a globalizing world. Your customer may be from China, or from France or Tunisia. You should be able to provide the best service to people in different geographies. If you need any support at this point, you can contact me. We can provide you with a roadmap and training support, and if necessary, practical support. Stay well until our next post.