Andrew, I don't know about cultural sensitivities; best that you start talking to Islamic people and your specific audience as early as possible! I've got a couple of Islamic friends and they've never mentioned any deep-seated resentment of the internet, except a general awareness of how american and anglo it can be. I've worked with Islamic people on some simple community work, and found a huge range of cultural preferences concerning formality of dress and speech, etc. I wouldn't assume anything about cultural preferences without asking first.
I can say that creating a controlled vocabularly is important: you'll need to determine the precise mapping between various labels and instructions before you can design and develop a navigation structure and labels on controls etc. Whilst you can source content from different database tables specific to the language, sourcing the labels for controls and navigation may come from a different part of the application. You'll also have to closely control the character encoding and language for both browser display and for search engines. In my experience, multilingual websites involve: sub-directories for images and css for different languages, different records for langauge specific content, look-up tables for cross-language searching, language and geo-targeting for active detection of language preference, a source for navigation and control labels, a multi-lingual data source for error messages, page and character encoding, different time and date formats and the possibility that you have a user from one language group accessing from a computer that appears to be from another language group (so, user control of language and geo-targeting configuration). Cheers Paul Paul Minty Director mintleaf studio We design & create stylish websites Post: Box 6 108 Flinders Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Level 2 108 Flinders Street Melbourne T. 03 9662 9344 F. 03 9662 9255 M. 0418 307 475 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.mintleafstudio.com.au -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Harris Sent: Friday, 2 November 2007 10:46 AM To: WSG Subject: [WSG] multilingual website advice Hi all, I've been asked to work on a multilingual website - including rtl scripts. I've done bits and pieces before, but always other languages in predominantly english websites. Although I see the problems as mainly technical, I'm getting vibes from others in the team about some mysterious 'cultural sensitivities' that we'll have to consider as the audience in this case includes the Islamic community. Perhaps foolishly, I had assumed that a sensibly designed website, free of pr0n ads and political cartoons, would be acceptable in most cultures, but maybe I'm just naive. I'm asking for any gems of wisdom - links or first hand advice, mostly technical, but anything that deals with the pitfalls in building arabic websites would be great. (I should point out the obvious one, we will be engaging native speakers and expert editors - not simply relying on babelfish ;-) Thanks in advance. -- Andrew Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.woowoowoo.com ~~~ <*))))>< ~~~ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
