Accommodating to the changes: Developing the university website in Three Foreign Languages

Globalization has brought new challenges to the governance, economy, industry and many other areas including the academia. . The new challenges require the academia to reach out to the global community especially in the chase for global promotion, in getting more international students and establishing international collaboration. For this reason, the websites in multiple languages would be an advantageous means to reach more audience and generate 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 for multicultural readership. This paper described the processes of developing the 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 in 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 was identified. 50.62% of the links were translated and 23% have only the first page translated. 25.93% of the links were not created in the foreign language websites. This study found that hierarchical charts and process flow diagram were effective in the development of a mirror image web site development.