New Languages The PATTA Group

The Requirement

PATTA are longstanding and much loved client of ours who took their market position to new heights with a rebrand in 2018 followed by a brand new website developed on the 1WL CMS. You can read more about the development project here.

As an establish and highly regarded, global product manfacturer, the approach for 2020 has been growth into new markets. That kicked off in March 2020 with the addition of a new language with new challenges - Arabic. Later in October 2020, we added Portuguese for their Brazilian market.

The Approach

The original 1WL CMS system was already built for multiple languages. The website launched in English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) and Vietnamese. Adding more languages was something the website was built for.

In both languages the approach was the same. Export all of the latest content from the Live website into Excel documents that we send to translators. As soon as the translations come in, content-freeze the website (so content cannot be changed), take a full website backup and install it on our development environment.

The Work

The PATTA website is optimised to make the process of adding new languages as efficient and straightforward as possible. It is still time consuming, repetitive and requires a lot more concentration than some might assume. When you don't speak a language, mistakes are easy to make and impossible to spot.

The process is a manual one, overwriting English content with the translations. Different issues can arise depending on the language. Common ones are choosing a font that works when the core English font doesn't contain the right characterset. There are issues when text is considerably longer or shorter than the native language around which the site was originally designed. These require coding and updates to overcome.

Then there are languages with a different characterset and reading direction such as Arabic. For this to work, changes are required for the front end pages. A professional integration requires a complete reversal (mirror flip) of the website - not just text but placement of every aspect of the design needs reversal and optimisation.

The Result

The most important aspect of adding new languages, is that the User Experience and Journey is maintained at the same level as for the native language. Whether it's Arabic, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese or Vietnamese (each having different requirements to each other) the end game for us as website developers, is to create a natural implementation where everything language works as a native language on ANY device.

The most important thing - PATTA are happy. That makes us happy too, and we look forward to more language challenges in future.