We started with doleague in spanish on december 2012. After 5 months, today we can say that doleague.com is a multilanguage site with two languages, english and spanish. I want to share with you the steps we have done to reach here, because it has not been as easy as someone could think.
The web app was translated into English long time ago, on the version 0.2 launched on January the 23rd. This was one of the first things we wanted on the app so it was easy to do as it was planned since the beginning.
Translate the website was not that easy, mainly because we made a mistake and forgot about it during two months and also because most of the webs on internet have not been designed for several languages. This required us to install again the blog to be able to create the connections between the spanish and english pages.
Also it was required to translate the frontpage video, which we did and because there is no voice on it (trust me, you do not want to hear a spanish guy talking on a video in english ;)), it was an easy task.
We like the final result on the website. You can test it clicking on the small flags on the top menu, if there is two of them. Only one flag will be shown when there is only one language for the post.
But the website was not the end of our problems, we still needed to connect the social networks. And you know, the people behind the social networks did not think about this. So after a small test on Facebook we decided that the only way this is going to work is to duplicate the social network and create the english ones.
So now you can follow “@doleague_en” on Twitter, our english Google+ page and our facebook english fan page.
The bad is that now we have everything duplicated, so the work is double too. Also we will have the fans splitted on two accounts. But, on the other hand, the content the users will receive is going to be better so the engagement will be better too. You cannot send a “great hockey tournament tweet”to the spanish guys, because they are going to ignore it completely.
So, at the end, we think this is a goog solution for everybody, a little more work for us, but better experience for you, the user. What do you think?
