Accommodating to the Changes
Developing University Website in Three Foreign Languages
Keywords:
Website development, university website, international students, Institutional website in multiple languagesAbstract
Globalization has brought new challenges to governance, the economy, industry and many other areas including academia. The new challenges require academia to reach out to the global community especially in the chase for global promotion, getting more international students and establishing international collaboration. For this reason, websites in multiple languages are advantageous to reach more audiences and generating more promotion for the universities. The development of university websites usually takes massive collaboration among the teaching, administrative and technical staff. The development processes are more complex when the websites are multilingual and are aimed at multicultural readership. This paper described the processes of developing university websites for the readership of potential international students. The University website was in English and the mirror image websites in three foreign languages were developed using Hierarchy chart and Page layout techniques. The languages in context were English, Mandarin, Thai and Arabic. Apart from the cultural and linguistic diversity, these languages also have different writing systems that add to the complexity. The development was carried out by two technology staff and the rest were the administrative and teaching staff. The objective of the paper is to describe the processes that were carried out within the website development project, followed by the techniques for overcoming some of the typical development issues and finally the outcome of the projects. The foreign language websites were constructed as a mirror image of the official English website and the analysis showed that 81 links on the English website were identified. 50.62% of the links were translated and 23% have only the first page translated. 25.93% of the links were not created on foreign-language websites. This study found that hierarchical charts and process flow diagrams were effective in the development of a mirror image website development.
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