International Interaction Design Goes Beyond Translating the Words
Mar 07 '01
The Bottom Line Either check that your translation service has experience with interaction design and usability or make sure to run your own user test with the localized site.
When you localize a website (or other interactive system, such as a software GUI) into a different language for use in a different country and culture, you are creating a new user interface design.
Even if the original site/design has great usability, the localized version may fail to serve users in the other country nearly as well. The reason being that most traditional translators are good at translating static documents (books, brochures, etc.) but do not understand interaction design.
In one of my recent studies, a group of U.S.-based websites had a success rate of 42% when tested with American users. In other words, native users were capable of accomplishing 42% of the tasks. In contrast, European users were only capable of accomplishing 15% of the tasks when using the localized versions of the sites in their respective countries.
This particular study stands out because the difference in usability between the original sites and the localized sites was particularly striking, but drastically reduced usability is commonly found in international usability studies.
The simplest recommendation is to try to use translation services that have experience with interaction design and understand, for example, how to chose words for a navigation bar that will help users visualize the information architecture and understand the differentiation between the categories.
In real life, however, translation and user interface design may be sufficiently different skills that they would be rare to find in the same company. In any case, at this time, we know so little about international usability that it will always be highly recommended to check the localization of any major website in a real user test with local users.
(A little bit of an aside: It's sad but true that most big websites don't bother testing with foreign users. They *should*, but they don't.)
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