 Yeah, so I usually talk and ramble way too much, so let's see how this goes. I might not be very successful at 12 minutes. But yeah, so my original talk was gonna be about how to create the almost perfect multilingual website. And we were gonna talk about the whole setting up process and detail, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not gonna happen in 12 minutes. So I'm gonna kinda just go quite quickly through some of the key things that over the years I've come across and noticed that always people either other people seem to miss or that we've experienced in our company missing things that hopefully you can learn from and try and take back and not do the same mistakes as we do. So a little bit about me, because I'm that important, not really. I'm a bit weird, first of all. Why do I sort of have this big interest in multilingual websites? The reason is basically this. I'm originally from New Zealand. I then lived in Argentina. And then I went to Australia for about six years. And then I came to Finland after spending a few months living in Uganda doing some stuff at UNICEF. So I've got a bit of a weird background experience in different countries where people do speak English, people don't, people have more than one language in their country, and things like that. So for me, this is quite a passionate thing because I also have in four of those countries had the experience of being someone living there but who doesn't necessarily speak the language and the frustration of trying to find your way around things. If that's my details, if you want to stalk me or ask me questions because we don't have questions today. So let's get started. So content stuff. So when we're doing a multilingual website, think about, as I said before, if you value the person's visit, value their language. If it's someone that you think is, you're gonna get something out of as a customer or just as a user in general, you probably should have content in their language. But then there's this wonderful thing that people often tend to do, mainly in Finland but in also other countries, is briefly in blank. Don't do it ever, not even ever. It is the most offensive thing almost. You may not realize it, but it just makes you feel degraded. For the fins in the room, if you've been on Finnair recently and you've noticed that they've started swapping the language of the videos, so now it has everything in English and then it has this briefly in Finnish. I would be really offended being like, hey, this is my flag carrier and you're telling me in five seconds what you told everyone else in three minutes. You clearly value me. So it really kind of knocks the user down a bit from the start. So when we talk about the content, you want to keep the key content in sync. So that means if you have a big website with a blog, with news, et cetera, et cetera, you don't have to have everything translated by any means, but make sure that the key information that someone might need to know about your company, about your organization, about your event, make sure that that's translated and it's correct. Don't leave it so that your main language is correct and then you realize that your language or your stuff in English or in Spanish is two years behind as I found out for an event recently where I got the dates wrong because they hadn't updated their thing in two years. So keep it in sync. Because if you translate it, then people will come. If people go to your website and they don't see their language is there and they maybe expect to, they're not gonna bother. If you actually translate it, people are obviously, funnily enough, more likely to go and say, oh yeah, okay, I'm gonna go to your event. I'm gonna work with your company. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And consider your resources though. So at the end of this, yes it would be lovely to have a million languages and do this and that, but be realistic about what the resources you have in your organization or company or whatever. If you can't afford to translate into four languages, then don't. Pick the two that are most important and sort of go from there. And do it right or just don't do it at all. So kind of going back to the thing about this briefly in whatever language. If you're not gonna translate the key stuff properly and actually put the effort in, then I would say even don't bother at all because you're just gonna start providing misinformation, frustrating people with bad user experience and bad content and it's just, you're gonna end up having people walk away from you with a bad experience. Speaking of experience, user experience and user interface things. So these are things that you should think about with the design and with the layout of your site. So how are people going to find their language? You may think this is a pretty obvious thing, like yes there's a thing in the corner, but you'd be surprised. A lot of websites I've come across, you have to dig into the menu, especially on a mobile and it's actually really hard to find how to switch your language. And then you just go, well they don't have my language, I'm gonna leave the website, I don't care, I don't have time. This is always a fun one. Do you auto detect the websites based on their browser language? Yeah. It's a useful feature, but you have to think of the market you're in. Finland has a weird thing in particular where a lot of people's computers are either in English or their browsers are actually set to English. So they will be redirected first to the English page even if they're going to a site that has finished language. So you just have to really think about that. Also there's sort of weird situations that are becoming more common, that this comes down to local codes. If you don't know what a local code is, please Google it, look it up, read about it because they're actually very important with multi-lingual websites. But essentially if your site says that you're, if you're a Swedefinn and you have your computer in Swedish but you've set that you're living in Finland, your local code will be sv underscore fi. And very few country, very few websites will probably have that as a language set in their website. In Finland you might have that's been set up correctly, we'll come to that in a moment, but often it's better to actually sort of give the user the chance at the very start to select a language. But it just depends, you have to think about the user base. Yeah, this kind of comes back to that sort of point as well. If you come from Google or if you come from somewhere and you get sent to the wrong language, how easy is it for the person to find out that, A, do you have this content in their language? And B, how do you get there? Again, when you have to dig into mobile menus like for ages and ages just to change your language, it becomes frustrating. Depending on your needs, you might have something down the bottom that says, hey, this article or this content is also available in these languages or there's many different ways, but that's something you shouldn't think about. How do you deal with that situation? Yeah, my favorite. No flags ever, like ever. Unless you're showing a country. I always like to use the example of Finland. You have two, three languages. So what language does the Finnish flag actually represent? A lot of people probably here would say it's Finnish. Okay, Swedish has their own flag, that's fine. Samen, well, that's a good question. But when you go to a global site, so it's not actually a site that's really got information specific to a country, but it's a global site, if you put the US flag as English, I'm from New Zealand, I speak English, that's not my flag, not my president. So you've got to think about this sort of thing. So I would always recommend don't use flags unless you are really saying, okay, this content is for this region of the world, technical stuff. So these are some things that you might need to look out for. And most of this is handled by plugins, but there are a few things you should be aware of. And this is more about testing and checking at the end of sort of developing a site. So is your locale right? So before I said about the issue with, for example, sort of sweetfins and sort of Swedish from Finland, because a locale, yes, there are certain set locales, but it does affect where your browser is, or where your site sort of loads based on your browser if you use that. Also, Google has some stuff to do with that that they'll be checking, so they'll be actually presenting certain content if you've got lots of different languages based on your href, no, hreflang, yeah, hreflang tags. There's a lot of technical stuff in there that Google and other search engines use to identify the correct content for the users who are searching for it. So you need to get that right. The problem with this is that, and again, I'm gonna use the Swedish from Finland example. When you, if you go on to say polylang and you put in the locale code, which it would then use to pull the language files, or WordPress would use to pull the language files, I don't think that there's a Swedish finish translation is there? Nope, exactly. So it's gonna take the Swedish one, so it's not gonna take the Swedish one though. So it's gonna say, ah, this doesn't exist. So you go, cool, I'll change it to SE SV underscore SE, which is the Swedish from Sweden. But then you're giving the wrong locale code in your hreflang tags, and then you're gonna redirect people wrong. That's something you have to sort out manually. I think that's something that WordPress one day might want to work out how to fix to let you kind of set things, but that's another story. But yeah, check those locale codes. That's really, really important. Does your theme even internationalize or localize? So these days I think this is less and less of an issue, but just making sure that especially if you're developing custom themes or custom plugins even, that you set this stuff up correctly so it can actually be translated even by yourself. And then look at tools. Now we just told that local translator is not that great, apparently, okay? I think it's a good tool for using when your clients want to translate things. So it's great, you can use PoEdit as an agency or as a developer just to do this, but if your clients want to actually change certain translations, this can be useful. It could also be something that you possibly kind of put there, let them do their stuff and then take it away later. Local translates actually backed by a company which calls themselves localize.biz, I think, which actually have a big, they actually have like a whole full-on interface for translating apps and all sorts of things, which is something that we actually use on some projects, which is another option. And you can also get the same effect of giving your clients the ability to translate things if they want to. Oh, let's see how fast we're going. No, I told you I ramble. Accessibility, so for the most part, again, this is taken care of by plugins, but just check that if you're using flags. Please don't. If you are, flags aren't particularly accessible. If you have issues with seeing colors, they can mess things up. So make sure that you've got the right text and information there and make sure that it's readable. I would say that it's much easier to identify a language from a word than it is from a flag. SEO stuff, pretty simple. Choose a structure that's standardized, I would say, that makes sense. This also comes to user experience side of things that users can understand what's going on with where they are on your website. So whether you have country and language or just language, then they understand. Watch out for unlocalized strings. Just, they pop up everywhere, trust me, so just make sure you do a good check of your website. You don't have the title and the title bug on. And country domains, when you do like Google search console, check through those because you need to set this sort of stuff up correctly. That's something you need to do specifically. But this is something that Google have sort of redefined. It used to be that a .fi would be focused on Finland. That doesn't matter anymore. They have now changed this. So now a .fi, it can be sort of localized, but they'll, if you put sort of Swedish content or Norwegian content that's targeted at those countries, they're not gonna penalize you in search results. And yeah, get Google search console. Things got an equivalent so that you have all that everything set up. Sorry, I'm almost finished. I think that, these are the key things though. Make sure that what you're doing is helping your users find things and understand how your site works. Don't skimp on content. And before you release something, just check your setup actually works and does things the way it's supposed to. If you have questions, ask me later or you can tweet at me. I usually rant on Twitter, so maybe don't read my tweets or email me. Thank you very much. Thank you, Thomas. I kind of, I already knew that why you are talking multilingual sites because you really know your stuff. So please keep on rambling around with those issues. Because it's pretty common nowadays that you actually build multilingual websites anyways. So it's really important to get things right. Especially here. And I assume that elsewhere also. We are not gonna have a big break now but if you want to change rooms, you can do that now.