>What Makes People Click: Pages in Many Languages

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
[ Resources for Program Marketers ][ Program webpages (TESOL 2001) ] [ Bibliography ]

Pages in Many Languages

It requires a degree of trust to put a page on the web when you are not quite certain that it's grammatical, let alone pleasing to the eye, to someone across the globe. If you pay translators and web designers, you can sleep better, except that you'll wonder if your money has been well-spent, given the fact that many students who come to the US already have enough English to fill out a simple application, or have access to someone who will help them. You may protest that you never needed one before (true, but you may have reached out to find a translator for a letter or phone call at times); you may also notice that it will be easiest for you to manage pages in languages which have the smallest potential market, and much harder to manage the ones you really want (1).

In addition to the above dilemma is the fear that you might offend one nationality by providing pages in other languages but not providing pages in theirs. I have no evidence that anyone gets offended in this way, but to carry this logic to its extreme would be to then be unable to have any pages at all, without having pages in every language.

A smaller dilemma is that Chinese is written in two scripts, one commonly used in Taiwan and another in the People's Republic, and that simply marking one of them as "Chinese" is somewhat ambiguous, putting you in the center of what could be a political question. Nevertheless, a recent study of intensive English programs (see Appendix B) showed that a number of them are taking the plunge, and trying, at least, to put information out there in languages that are more comfortable for their potential students to read, absorb, and take home to their parents. Another reason they may want to do this is to begin submitting these page URL's to search engines in other languages (see Ch. 7), to have some presence in the part of the web that functions in that language (2).

The study showed various things. Japanese and Spanish are the most dominant languages connected to the programs studied, but there are pages in languages as diverse as Swedish, Bulgarian, Indonesian, and Thai. Some programs mark the languages by putting little flag buttons on the main page, but again, which would you use for Spanish? Spain's flag? It's a touchy question, obviously, when most of us in the ESL/EFL business are aware how easy it is to touch a raw nerve. On the technical side of these pages, my knowlege is still limited, but I can only say that they involve charsets (character settings), which you will begin looking for within each page. You will find, I think, that they are doable but not easy; that outsourcing them is quite expensive; and that their value is as yet somewhat untested. If you like a good challenge, I say, you're in the right place.

Footnotes:

1. We found, for example, that we didn't have to go far to get grammatical corrections on an Italian page that was created by Babelfish, but pages in Korean and Chinese, made by the same source, were more difficult, because the charset, or character set, sets up a relationship between type and visual characters, and an alphabet that is mostly familiar is much easier to work toward than ones that are not.

2. This would make more sense if one's new page came off of one's homepage and other pages that are all in English, and thus would be difficult for a foreign- language search engine to find. Though there is a Google in every language, search engines still treat new languages like firewalls, and thus may not put your foreign-language page in the right bin right away, if it isn't linked to by a number of other sites.

Sources:

Instructional Computing Group, Harvard College (2002).Creating Foreign Language Webpages. http://icg.harvard.edu/fl/fl_html.html

Resources:

How to Write Bilingual Pages, Charles Kelly

Global Internet Statistics from Global Reach

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Pages in Many Languages

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web