Multilingual websites are successful. Companies realize that the price to pay for translating their websites is minimal compared to the benefits. The WWW has an international audience, therefore a company that wants to do business abroad should provide its website in the language of the country and with due regards to the specific cultural aspects of the country. Research has showed that customers prefer websites speaking their own language. Also principles and examples that work for a certain country or culture don’t necessarily work for other countries or cultures. In website design, internationalization is often overlooked. Frequently, the time pressure to go on-line is so high that internationalization is not considered or is postponed. Also often, the problem is wrongly reduced to a “translation” problem.

In this project we want to combine the research activities done in the context of software localization with those done in the context of website design. We believe that research in localization and internationalization of websites (and software in general) may benefit from a cooperation between researchers from the software localization community (which are mainly linguists or computer linguists) and researchers from the web design community (mainly computer scientists). Such a corporation may give new insights and may result in new techniques in both domains.

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