Design for translation
Soap is not a four-letter word in German.
Many years ago a group of well-intentioned folks got together for the altruistic goal of building an edifice that would literally reach into the heavens. Well, El Supremo had other plans for the Tower of Babel. All that humanity got to show for their efforts was a mind numbing cacophony known as the babble of languages. As a result, selling soap online to a global audience is not as simple as we’d like to think. The following is a bit of cautionary advice not only for the marketer but also for the graphic and motion designers in your agency’s creative department.
As you plan your creative, and particularly localized landing sites, be careful to design for dynamic formats. Language translation cannot only be a messaging challenge, but it can also be a design challenge. The visual designer may spend agonizing hours kerning and spacing a paragraph to balance the look perfectly only to find that in translation "soap" has become "wäschereiseife" in German.
What once was a well-designed block of text becomes a ragged paragraph with gaping negative space. Even worse, if the designer "hard codes" a paragraph, it becomes a graphic text block that may have to be re-keyed in fonts that accommodate a unique Cyrillic character. To avoid this issue, most smart designers use Unicode typefaces (also known as UCS fonts or Unicode fonts) to accommodate a wide range of characters and symbols from different languages. The fonts contain embedded instructions that inform the operating system what special ligature forms (unique letter combinations) are necessary to be applied, or how to correctly space letters using kerning pairs.
Some designers are very resistant to using Unicode fonts, particularly in display type such as headlines. But the generic and universal properties that make these fonts so valuable also make them somewhat bland. To avoid this, create a dynamic design that can automatically update graphical headlines from a predefined database. This technique also applies to any localized graphical elements such as photos, video or Flash-based movies.
Dynamic page design requires up-front planning and coordination. But when complete, the final product appears to the user as a well-designed, localized website or ad unit, and to the client as a functional, updateable and cost-effective piece of communication.
