Parlez-vous Zweinull, Señor? Providing Cross-National and Multilingual Web Communities

Web communities may be designed to connect people in different nations, speaking different languages. Or they simply find themselves being used that way. For those operating the web community site, a lot of questions have to be dealt with regarding content architecture, navigation architecture, domain and country realms, co-existence of languages, search terms and tagging in a multilingual context, character encoding, and so on. And all of that as a comfortable solution of visitors’ use cases.

Multilingualism being a natural issue for the Swiss, the speaker, working for a Swiss web company in Germany, offers real-life experience dealing with multilingual and cross-national web community contexts. We will present challenges of such web communities, good and not-so-good examples, and decision support when dealing with these problems.