I attended a Summit on Internationalisation, organized by W3C Indian Office. The conference focused on issues specific to Indian market and some of the solutions to these issues.
Richard Ishida, the Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C, spoke about the need to separate presentation from content and if done properly, can go a long way in developing better multi lingual sites.
Now, this separation of concerns is a major premise behind content management systems. My colleagues, Sujatha and Kashyap, took this idea further and spoke about how a content management system can be an enabler for building multi lingual sites. Their premise was that for building a multilingual website, one needs to think about these issues at each stage of the life cycle and a web content management system can help you with that. To summarize their presentation, it is helpful if:
- Strong processes are in place that helps one integrate business goals, people and technologies (Global and Local Content Managers, Translations etc.)
- A good content management infrastructure is there
- User experience has been tailored to local needs