Collaborative websites, open authoring, content management systems, wikis…the number of organizations I work with that have multi-authored collaborative websites has exploded over the past two years. Now all stakeholders within an organization are capable of maintaining and updating their own web pages without going through a corporate webmaster. Sounds great, doesnt’ it?
Well, it is…but there’s a “but”. What are the implications of collaborative authoring when an organization decides to take its website multilingual?
Many of these sites have deep, rich content that is interesting to translate. That’s the upside for both the organization and the translator. The downside is that collaborative websites are often a mishmash of diffferent tones of voice, web page structures or lack thereof (header or no header? subtitles or no subtitles?), and inconsistent terminology…in other words, different authors using different words for the same concepts (applicant or candidate? teaching faculty or instructors?).
In my experience, there is a single best practice that outshines all the rest in terms of overall quality of a website’s copy and the subsequent translations into other languages: hiring a journalist or copywriter to rewrite all internally-authored content before it is published on the website.
The benefits are many: consistent tone of voice, a coherent structure carried over across the different pages of the site, more web-friendly writing, and consistent use of terminology (how many times have you clicked on “Clearance” in the navigation menu of an e-commerce site only to land on a page called something entirely different like “Special deals”, leading you to wonder whether you were actually on the right page or not?).
When rewriting is not possible (budget is the main culprit according to what customers tell me), a house style guide and some training can help ensure consistency and improve web writing practices.
Don’t get me wrong — collaboration is a powerful thing. But when it comes to outbound communications, showing the world a unified face can be more effective in terms of getting your organization’s message across and is a necessary step before going multilingual.
