Monday, September 18, 2006

The problems of website design in bilingual cultures

As a translator, I spend a lot of my time looking at bilingual websites, as they make for excellent parallel texts. This being Canada, we have plenty of bilingual websites, as well as bilingual packaging on all our products, so I have grown accustomed to the graphic affordances of bilingual texts.

But this can be a problem when website designers don't consider how the omnipresence of bilingual material might affect how users scan the page.

I was just looking at this page. I read about this gizmo in the paper, and wanted to see how much it costs. So I went to the page I have linked, scanned it quickly, but didn't see a price. I could see a link for the money-back guarantee and a link to the Time article, but I couldn't see any other links that might help me find the price. I clicked around the title and the graphics in vain, but there were no other links. Then, after far too long a time, I noticed the "Buy your sleeptracker today!" link on the bottom-right.

Why didn't I notice this right away? Because the layout of this page suggested that it might be bilingual. There are two relatively equal-sized columns of text separated by a wide space, and two relatively equal-sized links. This is consistent with the standard design of bilingual front pages, like this. My eye automatically went to the left-hand column, saw that it was English, read it, and saw the warranty link below. I then subconsciously assumed that the right-hand column said the same thing in French, and the link was the equivalent in French.

If the text had been all in one block instead of in columns, I would have been able to navigate the page easily. However, the two columns and two links, while possibly appropriate in a print ad, gave me the impression that it was a bilingual page so I should ignore the right-hand column.

Web designers: keep this in mind! Translation and tech writing students: you could get a text analysis exercise out of this!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess I haven't been here long enough to have fallen for that! I still get eye-boggled by the bilingual sites.

impudent strumpet said...

For websites specifically, I'm sure it's more a function of my job and my specific eduation than my living in Canada all my life. I've been working in bilingual online environments every day for the past six years.

The "skip the French" instincts definitely come from bilingual packaging, but I doubt the majority of Canadians have developed such a strong instinct for where the French would be on a website.