by Jean Graef and Walter Underwood

November, 2006

Most global organizations that do business in more than one country must create navigation systems in multiple languages — even when English is their "official" language. It's not just a matter of translating existing content. The tricky part is creating localized navigation tools — topic hierarchies, A - Z indexes, search results — that make it easy for users to find what they want in a language they can understand. This article discusses the basic issues involved in multi-lingual navigation, includes the summary of a recent conversation with Walter Underwood, a search expert at Netflix, on how search engines deal with languages, and concludes with a discussion of multilingual thesauri.

Background

Language issues: the user's perspective
Users experience language issues in one or more of the following scenarios:

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Created on December 8, 2006 l Updated on December 31, 2006