Multilanguage management: US style vs. European style
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Managing content in multiple languages is usually very difficult, and the more languages you have, the more difficult it usually gets. That said, there are two clearly different ‘schools of thought’ in managing multiple languages. From my experience, there are the ‘US style’ and the ‘European style’. The difference is not always very clear, and many big corporations actually apply both styles – sometimes at the same time.
Typically, most clients tend to fall in either of these categories. As consultants this is something we at times have to be hard to the client. Clients have to choose which style is closer to their requirements – at least on a regional level.
So what are we talking about?
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This article is a part of CMS selection article series by North Patrol.
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US style is the approach where you clearly have one master language, usually English. In US style your main concern is whether all different regions and languages follow the master language. This is the approach that many truly global brands tend to take. Consumer electronics brands are good examples. They don’t want too much regional variance, they want everything to be very unified – following the ‘big brand book’. Having central control over updates and workflow is usually very important for organizations that follow the US style.
Government organizations usually also tend to follow the US style even though they might not have the resources to translate everything 1:1. But they do want a centralized view where they can see which languages are 100% translated and which languages only partly.
The European style, on the other hand, does not care so much whether all language versions are identical. Actually it might even be encouraged that different languages and regional versions are different from the master language. This makes a lot of sense especially for brands that operate in different countries and have to adapt to different local environments. For example, if you sell sports equipment all around Europe, you probably want to have a campaign for different products in Sweden and Spain during winter.
From my experience, surprisingly many brands actually need to adapt to different regions, and often you have local marketing people who need truly good tools to adapt the marketing campaign and the product pages to suit local weather conditions or cultural differences. In European style, it is usually most important to be able to offer templates and media assets centrally so that local editors can use those and adapt them to their needs. Sometimes you need to be able to do the same also to content items, so that local editors can use the content items as inspiration or as templates for their own writing.
The difficult thing is that supporting both of these approaches at the same time is truly a challenging issue – even though most vendors will happily claim that they can do it…
The biggest question regarding multilanguage management requirements, therefore, is how much US-style requirements and how much European-style requirements the client has. Big corporations typically have requirements on both sides, and then the question arises which are more important in which regions or product areas?
This question is also critical because some web content management systems are much more suitable for the US style than the European style. I believe the classic (bad) example, at least in Europe, tends to be SharePoint which doesn’t really understand the European style at all. On the other hand, some systems are clearly designed to support the European style much more than others, EPiServer being an example of this.
And then you naturally have systems like Drupal that are suitable for any approach you have – if you just have enough money to customize it the way you like it.
Sitecore is an example of a similar approach. But even though the system supports different approaches, it usually isn’t cheap. Commercial products have their strengths in many areas, but truly complex multilanguage management is rarely one of them.
Even after a good due diligence process, you might not find a perfect system for your needs. Multilanguage management simply is a pretty complicated matter. (I wish I could be more positive about this!)
Again, there are great systems out there that have a lot of clever tricks up their sleeves. Finding the right one just requires that you really, really decide which camp you belong to.
Perttu Tolvanen is a web concept design and content management system expert.
Perttu consults with clients on project planning and defining requirements, and supports customers in selecting content management systems and implementation partners. His areas of specialisation include facilitating concept design workshops and selecting content management systems.
Perttu has ten years of experience with web and intranet projects, including serving as a project manager and consultant. Earlier in his career Perttu has worked in procurement and as a project manager at a large media company, a content management system consultant at a large IT company and an independent, neutral consultant at his own firm. He is also a well-known seminar speaker and blogger. Perttu is also the editor of Vierityspalkki.fi, a Finnish blog about the Finnish internet and its creators.
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