When building a multi language website, it is crucial to ensure that the developed website looks polished and cohesive in both languages. For example, if the website supports both English and Chinese, it is required to take account for differences in font family, text size, and character spacing to ensure the user experience remains consistent.
Comparing WPML and Polylang for SEO-Friendly Multi Language Support
When it comes to creating a bilingual website, two popular WordPress plugins are used in the website which are WPML, Polylang and TanslatePress. Both plugins provide robust support for adding multilingual capabilities, but they differ in approach.
- WPML is a premium plugin that offers seamless integration for translating content, menus, and even WooCommerce products. It provides comprehensive SEO support by creating separate URLs for each language, ensuring better indexing by search engines. Additionally, WPML allows you to easily translate SEO metadata, improving visibility for each language version.
- Polylang, on the other hand, is a free plugin (with a paid version available) that is lighter in terms of features but still effective for creating multilingual websites. Polylang also supports SEO best practices by generating unique URLs for translated content. However, for complex translation needs, WPML offers a more intuitive interface and deeper integration with other WordPress tools.
- TranslatePress translates an entire website directly from the front-end, making the translation process very intuitive. It supports both manual and automatic translations via Google Translate or DeepL integration. It creates SEO-friendly URLs for each language and allows translation of metadata, slugs, and other SEO elements.
Why These Adjustments Are Important
Different languages have unique characters, symbols, and writing styles. Chinese, for example, uses a completely different set of characters than English. Therefore, if the website is not set up correctly, it might make the Chinese characters look out of place or hard to read, which can affect the user experience.
Why This Requires Extra Work
- Font Adjustments: Chinese text is required to choose a specific font that supports the characters and makes them easy to read. Unlike English, where there are countless standard fonts to choose from. The Chinese text requires careful selection of fonts like PingFang SC or others. Therefore, developers are required to manually make the changes in CSS which show in figure 1 to make sure that the text that appears will not be distorted or messy which would negatively impact the user experience.
Figure 1: CSS Customization for Website’s Chinese Version
- Grammar Adjustment: Chinese grammar differs significantly from English, especially in sentence structure and expression. Translating content while ensuring its grammatical correctness in Chinese required a lot of effort. For example, Chinese sentence order, word usage, and formality can vary based on context, therefore it is required to carefully adapt the content to make sure it reads naturally and fluently. This attention to detail ensures the content is not only translated but also communicated effectively to a Chinese-speaking audience.
- Content Layout: Chinese characters tend to take up more space or display differently than English letters. This means that even the layout of the website pages might need to adjust to align with the English version. For example, buttons, headlines, and other design elements may need resizing to accommodate the new text without looking cramped or misaligned.
SEO Adjustments: To ensure that the Chinese version of the website is optimised for search engines. It is required for the developer to change all the meta tags, descriptions and keywords from English to Chinese version. This process is considered as time consuming and also requires a different strategy from English SEO.
Website Responsiveness: To ensure that the website looks and works great on all devices, especially mobile phones become more complex with chinese versions. Due to the Chinese version displaying differently, it is required to take more time to carefully test and adjust the design to make sure it remains responsive. This involves more testing and coding adjustment to guarantee that the website is able to run smoothly and functional at different devices which align with the english version.
Testing and Debugging: After making the adjustments, It is required to thoroughly test the website in Chinese to ensure that everything works properly. This includes checking links, navigation, and forms, all of which may behave differently in the Chinese version due to the language change. Any issues that come up during this process need to be fixed.
Why is it worth it ?
These detailed adjustments allow the Chinese version of the website to offer the same quality of experience as the English version. Besides, this adjustment also proves to the chinese-speaking client that you care for their experience, which also increases overall user engagement and their trust. Skipping these steps could result in a website that looks off to Chinese users and is able to harm the company’s reputation and limit the connectivity to a large, valuable market.
The Value of Customizing Your Website for Multi Language Support
Enhancing a website for multi language support involves a range of specialized tasks rather than simple translation. Each step, from selecting appropriate font until refining layouts is required to ensure the website’s functionality in Chinese version and add a layer of complexity to the project. This approach ensures that the Chinese version of the site not only meets high standards of quality but also provides a seamless user experience. These efforts reflect the meticulous work required to deliver a fully polished and professional result to both English and Chinese audiences.
Conclusion
Adjusting multi language support involves additional work to ensure that both English and Chinese versions are well polished. This includes custom font selections, grammar corrections, layout adjustments, SEO optimization, device responsiveness and thorough testing. While these enhancements require extra effort, they are crucial for providing a seamless experience for all users, demonstrating a commitment to quality and accessibility across languages.