There are often going to be cases where having a bilingual website is important. Bridge Digital is based on Anglesey in North Wales where we are a bilingual community with English and Welsh both being widely spoken and Cymraeg (Welsh) being many families first language. To promote a website to be truly accessible, it is important that visitors can view this information in their chosen language.
This is not only the case in Wales, there are many regions that are bilingual, (Belgium, Canada, Finland, India, Ireland, South Africa and Switzerland) and of course tourist areas attracting multiple nationalities and languages.
So there is a need... But is it easy to make a bilingual website?
Well a lot will depend on the web authoring platform you are using. Bridge Digital does the majority of their websites on the WIX website platform, so this is what we will focus on in this article.
WIX has a prebuilt Multilingual module and from first hand experience it is very user-friendly and results in an excellent final result. Once a primary language is selected and the content created, you are able to use a Google Translate addon to automatically translate into one or multiple other languages.
Sounds too good to be true? Well... It's not perfect, Google Translate in general can not always fully recognise the context of some content and can not account for regional differences in languages. If the possibility to use a professional translator is an option, this would always be our recommendation and the accurately translated content can be added to the relevant language pages.
So do you have to almost create a site for every language?
No... The primary language site is the one with all the layout set, with written text, images, video etc. and this then forms a fixed template for the other languages with just the text translation editable.
BUT... a good website should always be evolving, with fresh up to date content and you need to remember and account for the fact this will need to be amended in each alternative language.
If you need any support in designing and building a bilingual website, please feel free to get in contact with Bridge Digital, even if you just want some free advice on options.
Email: Adam@BridgeDigital.uk
Phone: 01248 342344
Bilingual Site Examples: