A comprehensive overview of the business, technical and design strategies employed by successful muli-lingual websites.

Go to www.iimaonline.org to register for this event

What You'll Learn:

- Maximizing value and return from internationalizing your website
- how deploy and mange multi-lingual sites
- effective content structure & navigation
- how to leverage social media to generate multi-lingual content
- case studies and examples of some of the world's most successful multi-lingual sites

The top global websites now feature upwards of 20 languages! At our December IIMA meeting, Jim DeLaHunt will talk about Web 2.0 and multilingual websites for companies marketing both domestically and internationally.

Maximizing Value & Revenue From Your Multi-Lingual Websites: we look at business issues. Who needs multiple languages and what for? Is content in various languages the same or different? How/why different?

Content Structure & User Interface: we look at design issues. How to link content in one language to another? How to distinguish UI language from content language from geography focus? What are options for the URL structure? What special issues do non-text content (like videos, tags, links) bring?

Technology: we look at tagging content with language, at the need for localised URLs and meta text. We look at capabilities of Joomla, Drupal, WordPress CMSs for multilingual content. And we see how to use HTTP and URL clues to help select which language to supply.

Effectively Managing the Translation Process: an overview of options: paid translation, social translation, machine translation and what tools are needed. Crowdsourcing of UI translation, its risks and concerns. Using CMS to translator's tools and managing the translation process - the challenge of making all the parts move together and on time.

Also: Leveraging your social media strategy in multiple languages: we see who's doing it in multiple languages, and how. Wikipedia and cousins are massively multilingual and user-contributed. Facebook's translations application has successfully leveraged users to generate localized content.