 We have our third speaker this morning, her name is Lois-Chan-Petli. The topic is Breaking Language Barriers with Multilingual Sites. Please welcome Lois-Chan-Petli. Thank you so much, everyone. Thanks for the introduction, Tiffany. I want to acknowledge that we are together again on the unceded ancestral territory of the Khomeu and Slavotas Nation. And whenever I talk with elders, they stress to me how important language is to their cultures, to the culture of the First Peoples, and really how important language is to any culture. So I'm really quite honored to be talking about language at this event today. My name is Lois-Chan-Petli. I'm a web dev with about 20 years of experience. I work a lot with WordPress Nation Builder. I also work with other platforms like Shopify and stuff. I graduated from UBC ages ago. It's not mega relevant here, but if you're from UBC, hello. I've worked for the federal government where I built multilingual sites for several years. And as an IT consultant now, I get asked to do a lot of multilingual sites lately. So I thought I'd be sharing some of that information here. You can find me at frontmatter.ca or at fishtron on the socials, which I may or may not check, but there it is. So the question you might have is maybe why. I went to Japan in June with my family. We collectively spoke very, very little Japanese, but we could get around just fine. Nearly everyone there could speak a little bit or very fluently in English. All the signage was in English and Chinese and Korean. We did dual-lingual for months, but we didn't really need to maybe. So why go multilingual? Why invest in that when so many people can read and write in English? Why don't people just click the little Google translate button and choose from like a hundred languages that they so please and why bother going into it? So it's important to get to the why because the why can drive your how and the how much. And here are three big reasons why. The first one is called Can't Read Won't Buy. It is also the name, I mean that sums it up pretty well, but this is also the name of a market research series by CSA Research. They've been around since 2006 and have been refining their data and updating their data over the last 15 years. They delve into the research habits of consumers and businesses alike, business B2B, business to business as well as B2C, business to consumers. The last white paper is from June 2020 and here are some numbers that surprise even me. The first one is 40% of people will not buy in other languages. And if they're not proficient in English or that language, they're six times less likely to buy. So that means you're missing out on a large sector of people if they don't feel comfortable in that language that you're providing. Second number, 65% of people prefer content in their own language even if it is poor quality. 73% people want product reviews in their language if nothing else. And these numbers are pretty clear that having content in people's native language is pretty key to engagement and purchasing. And given these numbers, it almost doesn't make sense to not translate your content to meet your client's needs. I know for a fact that between my parents, my mom does all of the online shopping because her English is better. My dad will read product reviews and give my mom the download just because he gets a kick out of reading product reviews in Chinese. But if you can build a website that opens up his purchasing power or connect to him on some gut level in his native language, Chinese and Cantonese, more power to you. And reason number two is this crazy chart. This chart shows the top 10 languages used on the web. These numbers are from W3Tech. You can see English wildly dominates content on the internet. How many people can read or write? Oh, yes, for sure. I don't know if there's mechanisms to do that through the conference, but I can also tweet it out after the conference as well, for sure. I was wondering how many people can read or write or speak another language besides English in this room? Yeah, most of us. And how many can do that as their first language, as their native language? Yeah, a fair number of people. So that's wild because the W3Tech numbers shows that. And if you delve into it, that's predominantly American English content as well that dominates the internet. And this chart, what that shows is that there's an opportunity for search engine optimization. So even with basic SEO hygiene, you can get ranked pretty well on search engines. And if you think about most purchases starting with a search, that could be a game changer for your business and make a big difference for you. There's a bit of debate about the data and the methodology. Some people say their technique overestimates English, which I think does. Chinese doesn't even make it on this list. It's number 13. And that's bonkers. So here's another take from a different group of researchers called the Observatory. They're from France. But even here, you can see a pretty big gap between the two top Western languages, English and Spanish. And, of course, Chinese macro and then Hindi and so on. There's still a pretty big gap. These numbers may be more reflective of the multilingual nature of websites themselves, even like a predominantly English website may still have components that are in different languages. And these numbers will be good to keep in mind for developing your strategy of where you want to translate and how much you want to translate. This is something to keep in mind. Reason number three is that Google and users in general don't like it if you just copy and paste in your content everywhere because that's not valuable. That's not useful. But it's different if you write it in a different language. So, essentially, you can have your same content but translate it and you don't get penalized for duplicating content. And there's also other benefits, if you're multilingual, to writing out your ideas in different languages from a neuroscience perspective. There's lots of benefits for that, but that's out of the scope of this talk. So, that's fun. To recap, number one, the first reason is customers are more likely to purchase or engage if you're connecting with their native language. Even if the translation is a bit spotty. Number two, there are fewer sites created in non-English languages, so there's less competition and organic search results. And number three, in Google's eyes, translated content is not the same as duplicated content, so you can put it out there. Great. So, how are we going to do it? One of the first decisions that you're going to have to make is whether you get a human or a machine to translate for you. Manual or human translations have the advantage of being more accurate. We've all used Google Translate and found some pretty wonky translations of things. So, with a human translator, that's less likely to happen and you can often reduce the cost of proofreading or eliminate it entirely. You can get more nuanced or accurate translations where something sounds natural to a native speaker. And this might be very important for you if you're presenting content for a cause where you want to connect with someone on a deep and emotional level. However, one drawback is they can often take a while. You can only go as fast as your translator or your team of translators if you're going multilingual with multiple languages at the same time. I've heard of a horror story of trying to manage a team of nine translators on nine different languages and having a late game translation that all of a sudden, oh no, you have to track down everyone for one sentence and that can be a challenge. It can be also costly. So we were looking at an average of 10 to 20 cents per word and often human translators have a contract minimum. So you want to get organized and bundle up all your translations and send them up rather than doing them on a piecemeal kind of basis. In contrast, we have machine translations and I'm using the word machine and automatic translations interchangeably even though they're technically slightly different concepts. Automatic translation also refers to like the entire process from translation to proof reading to the publishing. Whereas machine translation strictly just refers to putting your source content into usually an AI and getting a translated content out of the other end. But for the purposes of this talk and most places, they're kind of one and the same. Here, automatic translations, the first benefit to using them is they're fast, they're instantaneous, available on demand. The pricing is much more predictable and a lot cheaper in some ways. They're usually $10 for millions of characters. We're looking at about 10,000 words. So that's quite a difference from having a human translator. And typically we're looking at like a monthly subscription for services like DeepL, Google Translate or Microsoft Azure. And they are getting more accurate. You probably still want to prove reader which can then add to the cost. Okay, so then with your translated content, how do you make the site? If you need another language, does that mean you have to build a whole other site? Yes, sort of, that's the sort of short answer. The simplest thing that you can do if you have a simple site is just to spin up another site. Copy your whole site over and then just swap out whatever content you have with your target language. And that's something that's viable for a smaller site. You have four or five pages and you only have to manage maybe two or three languages. That is totally doable to do all of that syncing up manually. And conceptually it's very easy for clients to understand if you're working with clients who has content for an English site. They can just update it on the English site. If they have Spanish content and they want to change it on the Spanish site and they don't have to touch the French site. Don't even have to think about doing that. And then any account of syncing up, you just do that manually and you turn that into a human process of synchronization rather than a technical one. Totally doable for a small site. However, if you have something a little more complicated, maybe you have more than a few languages. Or if you have e-commerce, for example, you'll want to look at plugins, which is why we're all kind of here, aren't we? So at a glance, all the plugins, there's a fair size market for multilingual plugins on WordPress. And they can generally do all of these things. They can translate your theme, your plugins, for example, WooCommerce, tags and categories, custom post types, no problem, SEO, and so on. You may need to pay a little more on the subscription to get some of these features. There may be additional setup required. Yeah, some of the setup gets a little more complicated, but they can all generally do all of these things. They support right-to-left translations and some sort of automatic translation as well as manual edits. And as you evaluate the plugins for your own project or your client's projects, things to look out for are, does it work with your theme and all your plugins? Currently, they don't all work together, but they tend to work with the major themes and the major plugins. Okay, so at a glance, these are the ones that I've used, I'm going to back up a bit. So these are all the plugins that I've used or extensively researched and compared. This isn't an endorsement of any of these, I'm not affiliated with any of them. And there isn't necessarily like a breakout star of the bunch. They're just going to be what's appropriate for your particular project. And choosing the right one depends, you know, you would still have to do your own research. But here are they at a glance. So the first group, I've grouped them together, Polylang and WPML. They're more of the back-end translators, what I like to call, they're easy to conceptualize in the sense that they are, you get your English side, you get your French side, and then you go in on the back-end and you translate the bits. And I find that for clients going into a multilingual site, which can already be very intimidating, this is easy for them to go, okay, I can picture this site, is this piece, that site, is that piece, and I can do the pieces and they can manage it on their own end. Easy to train clients on. Multilingual Press, very similar to Polylang and WPML, except it is compatible with and requires a multisite. All your sub-sites are your different language sites. And this is great if you already have a multisite set up, and then you can just have that on top and then you can link up your different languages, you can sync up the menus. And the challenge with that is it requires a multisite, so if you're not on a multisite, this could complicate your setup or raise your pricing hosting situation. Translate Press is a neat one, it is a front-end interface, and there's another one that's also neat later on. But yeah, you just go into site, you pick out the pieces that you need to translate, and then on the interface you can choose, I'm translating for French, I'm translating for Spanish, I'm translating for Chinese, and you can see at a glance all the different languages on, say, on your heading or on your body content, what that would look like. And that's very nifty. G Translate, translate your site with Google Translate on a fly. It's essentially the Google Translate button, but you can, the advantage to using this is that you can use the editor to edit your translated text if Google Translate kind of mess up or give you something wonky. And lastly we have Weaglot, who is one of the gold sponsors of this event, thank you. It is a translation as a service, you pay by the word count, whereas for the other ones you pay on a monthly or annual subscription, you license your site and then you're good to go. With Weaglot you pay by word count, and you can use one account for different platforms. For example, if you have WordPress, Shopify, NationBuilder, those are all, you can all fit them into your one account. It also has a front-end interface, however it stops working if you stop the subscription and you can download your translated content, but your site will no longer function as a multilingual website. So make a caveat on that one. Yeah, so these are all, these are kind of the major ones. There are some more free ones that you can poke into, but these are generally kind of what I would recommend to the client to compare for features and pricing and so on. I think these all, with the exception of WPML, have a free pricing tier, so you can go and try them all out. And then number three, I'm looking at the time. Number three thing that I want to get into today just briefly are the best practices of doing multilingual sites. I was talking with a group of people last evening about kind of the state of multilingual sites in general and how challenging it is to manage multilingual sites in this, which is surprising given how many of us are multilingual and yet on the internet websites are still a challenge. So the first thing that you will need to think about or even need to get your client to think about is how much you want to translate. And here is where you will need to think like your customers, where are the key pieces that you want to see, where they will want to see information in their own language, navigation of course, product info, reviews and testimonials, how to contact you, and check through the places where people will have heightened emotional responses. So just before hitting purchase, for example, or if they run into a problem on your forms, the error messages, it's very off-putting when someone sees an error message that they don't understand and they're like something has gone wrong and I don't understand what's gone wrong. Very, very upsetting. So check through those things. Don't forget about information tool tips, important little tips that are like when someone sees, oh yeah, there's a hint for someone that does not speak my language. There's a hint for someone who, again, I don't understand what this is, someone else is getting more information than me. That's very off-putting. So check through those little things. Next one, how do you know which languages you want to develop into? Three things here. First thing is ask your customers. You can do surveys, whether they're on-site surveys or on your newsletters if you have a mailing list. You can check through your analytics for when people don't do what they say. You can check for the system language of the devices that they're using, as well as you can check if someone's using the Google Translate button on your website because the Google Translate changes your HTML and it changes through some cool JavaScript stuff and you can use analytics to track when someone does that on your websites. And for the last one, if you're required to do it, then you're going to have to do it. If you're part of a national organization or a government agency, if you serve folks in Quebec, if you're serving people across the country, you're going to have to have English and French bilingual websites. The next thing is a bit about the design of multilingual sites. So this is a quote from Giuseppe Haydn-Chemfosi. I don't know if I got her name right. She's the ED of WordPress and this is from her work camp keynote. She says, what is the story you want to be able to tell about yourself? What is the story you want to be able to tell about your time with us in WordPress and what is the story that you want WordPress to tell? Which is a great sentiment. Good questions to ask yourselves at this event today and to fit that onto a website in French, it is about, I think the average is about 33% longer in French compared to in English. And then here it is in Chinese. It's about half that size. So when you're designing for a multilingual site from the UX point of view, I'm not a UX designer, but you're going to want to work with your designer on how are you going to fit, for example, all the menu items in the top nav. I have worked on many projects where the French menu is getting squashed in because we didn't think about the French menu, how they're going to look at the top. Maybe you need alternate translations. Maybe you need some special abbreviations and that's something that you're going to have to work with your translators to get. And maybe you just need an alternate header design or an alternate call to action design. Another thing that happens a lot is in buttons. The text don't all fit on one line in a button. What do we do? And so some of those things you're going to have to want to think about right off the bat. Okay, so a few more things that we want to think about and remember, you need a plan for all your translations. You want to tie it to your calendars to routinely update your content. How many of you have gone to a multilingual site and you flip between the languages and you're like, oh, this one is definitely more up to date and this one doesn't have the updated content? That happens a lot. If you don't have a plan, your content will drift apart. And then interesting thing about this, if you go back to the, if you go dig into the observatory data on web usage and consumer habits, people, sorry, it was actually from the Can't Read Won't Buy. My apologies. From the Can't Read Won't Buy report, people from certain areas of the world will prefer content in certain languages but also if they perceive the site to be more up to date in that language. So for example, French nationals actively avoid anglo-centric websites and they are much less likely to make a purchase or engage on a website where they think the website is much more up to date in English compared to in French. So that's something that you want to think about. You want to keep your content up to date for general reasons but also for a lot of psychological reasons of your consumers, of your customers. Second one is flags versus languages. I still see this a lot. Languages in countries are different things. So use language names or language codes. If I see a Kenyanian flag, does that mean English or French? It can be either one. I don't like seeing the American flag to represent English because I don't like it. I mean that's on me but I don't like that. So the best practice here is to use the language name or the code. I know flags are catchy, they're colorful but try to avoid that. Avoid text and images. If you have some text in an image, make sure you're also localizing it or best just to avoid using them. Icon meanings, double check. They mean what you think they mean in target audience. Another story from Japan. Thumbs up means good here. Thumbs up means good in Japan. Thumbs down means bad or don't like here. This means flipping off someone in Japan so don't do it. This is how you say no in Japan. You cross your fingers like this. This is no. So when you're doing, if you're relying on iconography to convey meaning, double check before you actually use it. SEO, it seems obvious but folks forget especially if you're using a front-end editor. Double check that your Facebook share, your cards and so on. All your meta tags are up to date. Lastly, you want to update your analytics setup because now you have double the content or triple the content if you're more going multilingual. So that's it. I'm at 29 minutes. I've shown you the why and the how as well as some tips to how to do a good multilingual site. Hopefully these will help your next multilingual project open more smoothly. If you remember none of those things, that's fine. You're still going to be doing a really good site connecting with people in their native language. It's a beautiful thing and we should all do it a little more. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask. Just a reminder that this will be posted online. So don't worry about the slides. We have a question over there. The question is about updating analytics and say more about how we would actually implement those changes. So analytics would be a bigger project. I could probably spend another full talk discussing the changes that would go into there. The main thing is to keep in mind GDPR compliance. You should make sure your main site now is GDPR compliant for sure but if you're going working in a global market you're going to need to make sure your privacy policy is up to snuff. Fun site note, Google analytics is not GDPR compliant in and of itself. Something to think about and I don't know if legally anyone is going to go after them at this point or go after you if you used Google analytics. But that's something to think about and to make a judgment call about. Another thing is you will want to think about off the back what your preferred setup will be. There's some... You want to keep it as simple as you can because all of a sudden you have a whole fleet of websites to look after rather than just the one. Whether you want to have one property with multiple streams or set up individual properties for the individual sites or do a hybrid setup of having both of those setups so that you could have an at a glance, a big picture with your one multi-site property and then be able to drill down into individual sites that's probably a really good setup. What you want to keep in mind is that if you have multiple sites multiple streams feeding into one property there is a cap on how much... What it's called is... I don't know what it's called off the top of my head but there's a cap to how much traffic it will look at before it starts sampling. So rather than capturing all the traffic data it starts just taking a portion of that. So having separated them out into separate properties you can get around that and be able to drill down into your individual sites but you'll still want something to take a big picture look at all your websites. Hi, thanks for the talk. It was very good. One of our pain points on a multi-site... French and English sites is synchronization. So somebody hits, they're on an article, they hit the French button and they go to the homepage instead of to the French version of that article. And of course we have stakeholders internally who use that toggle button all the time and then they're emailing me, where can I find this article in French? So I wonder if you can speak to that. I believe all the plugins that I've mentioned can support synchronization. Actually I don't know about GTranslate because it actually just translates stuff on the fly. So I'm not sure how the synchronization works there. I use WPML a lot and that is... basically you link the pages together on the back end and you can see on the English article for example you can see it's linked to this French version of the article. It's linked to the Spanish and the German and the Chinese version of the same article. And the language switcher widget, the French button, that will go straight to the same article in those different languages. So it's a manual process that you have to put the links for? It can be if you want to change it up but by default it is linked if the setup is correct. Yeah, and maybe something we can connect on later on if you want to. What about slugs? Does slugs matter? Slugs do matter. Good question. Slugs matter a lot for SEO. And again, all the plugins that I mention they do let you translate slugs. Some of them you have to pay for a subscription tier for the free version doesn't do it but then you can pay for a higher level one that does it. But yes, slugs are important. Check your slugs guys if you're translating your content you don't want to see about dash two for your apropos page for example. It could be a small question but what would you recommend if you are translating a web page would you want to open it on a separate window or would you want to see it on the same window? Like same tab or you want to open it on a different tab? If you click on translation? Yeah. Do you mean translating on the back end if I were the translator? So for an end customer, if my customer is visiting a website and the person wants it to be converted to let's say French and if I click on French would you recommend opening on a different tab or probably the same tab? That is a super good question. Yeah, my gut feel says same tab. Yeah. But I don't know if there's data that supports that gut feel. So I don't know the answer to that. I love it. There's like really good questions as well as good tips and tricks from the audience and I think this is like the great thing because this area is such a pain point for a lot of developers. I would love to be able to talk to you all about tips and tricks where you're struggling, where you have had successes and that would be great. So yeah, to have this time is for you guys. I have two questions. One about the websites and another one about YouTube. So the websites is do you necessarily change if you want to translate, you use another page or is there any advantage to use another subdomain or domain for the English version? That's the first question. And the other one is if you have a YouTube channel and you have lots of followers but you know another language it's better to create a new channel or combining in the one that you have more followers. Oh, for you. Okay, so I'm going to go with a YouTube one first. That is a hard one to know. I think the best practice for YouTube is you stick with your... you keep your languages separate and you start... because that's your question, right? If you start developing content in different languages do you create a new channel for all of those? Yes. I think that's the best practice. I'm not a YouTube expert and the YouTube algorithm shifts all the time but from what I've seen as a YouTube consumer that's what people tend to do. Your first question is about subdomains or whether you want to keep it on the same domain and subdirectories. Both are good and these days they both contribute to SEO rankings and so on. There's some debate about subdomains and whether they contribute to domain level authority. I think for the most part Google does a pretty good job to balance... if you have translated content their arguments against domain level authority is that, for example, YouTube has a wide variety of content a lot of sites with the same domain have a wide variety of content they don't want to have to assign domain level authority to the domain just because it's so big but for regular people's websites I think it does play into how much authority, how much your site gets ranked on the search engine even if you use a subdomain to publish your content. These days it's a bit of a cosmetic slash do you want to have a good branding in your different languages besides having subdomains the other thing is having completely different domains because maybe your English name doesn't make sense in French or in Spanish you want to have a French name and a Spanish name for your domain and those are all pretty much just the same as if you use a subdomain on your main English website domain or French website domain not with the plug-ins so if you set up the plug-ins correctly with subdomains the question is about can you still synchronize say your articles in English, French, Spanish and so on if you use a different subdomain or if you use different domains for all your different language sites and my understanding is that if your if your subdomains are and your different domains are set up correctly the synchronization will still work right yes if they're completely different sites the synchronization will not work but if you set up it's the same site but translated so that's the that's where the plug-ins really have that benefit of maybe we need to have a deeper conversation about this if it's one site that is translated into multiple languages but still within the same site then the synchronization will work yes we have yes that's right but that's where the multilingual press will be a good fit for if you migrate them all into a multi-site setup and then you can use multi-site to sync that up thank you Lois we have one more question I think and for anybody else don't forget we have social media where you can post your questions like wordcamp.ybr thank you hi when I came into the presentation I was thinking mostly in terms of the logistics of changing text but you brought up a couple of things the button sizes click a you see that must piss off Frankelpiles menu design and you also mentioned iconography what about color North America we think of white color as purity in Asia we think of it as death red is considered auspicious in or prosperity in China it's a caution color here what about those that what about the UX aspects of cringy that is a big question what a good question that's where you hire a cultural consultant hahahaha that's such a tricky thing because even designing for within our western dominant culture that the cultural significance of things plays such a big role in how people emotionally respond to your website your piece of media that is a really good piece to keep in mind I don't have an answer for how exactly you would do that except for just make sure you factor in the time because I think time the schedule thing on the last slide is a big piece a big piece of learning for myself when I was doing a lot of multi-lingual sites like have built in that extra time where you can to get those translations right get those cultural pieces right and rush yourself into making little seemingly little mistakes that are that could be tough to fix later on alright thank you so much everyone you've been a great great audience and I'd love to catch up with you about your adventures with multi-lingual sites let's give Lois another round of applause