Speaking in Charsets
Building a Multilingual Web Site
By John Yunker
As more and more of the world embraces the Internet, it is inevitable that less and less of the world will embrace English-only sites. In fact, it is estimated that by the end of this year less than half of all Internet users will be native English speakers. American companies are suddenly feeling the pressure to offer Web sites in multiple languages; perhaps you're feeling the pressure as well.
Yet how do you build a multilingual Web site when the only thing you know about foreign languages came from that high-school Spanish class you slept through? Don't worry. Language is often the least challenging aspect of customizing, or "localizing," a Web site for a foreign audience. The hard part is understanding all the technical challenges.
To localize a site properly, you must also know the cultural preferences, date format, currency, and bandwidth capabilities of the audience you're trying to reach. And for your users to view your site properly, you'll need to know how to tag your HTML pages correctly and which character set to specify (ASCII won't cut it in Russia). Finally, you'll need to know how to manage multilingual Web pages on the server and how to direct users to their language-specific content. In other words, even though you don't need to know a foreign language, you do need to learn to speak "charset" like a native.
To Japan and Back
For native English speakers, the easiest languages to begin with are those that share many characteristics (and characters) with English, such as Spanish, French, Italian, or German.
