Montreal's Alis Technologies offers globalization services and software for more than 90 languages. And Salt Lake City-based Alpnet has positioned itself as a specialist in cultural issues and multilingual content management. Lotus Development Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., meanwhile, provides Domino Global Workbench, a toolkit for developers creating multiligual Web applications. Language and cultural differences also complicate the creation of multilingual websites. You have to look at the whole picture, including the site's context, layout and graphics.
Dialects can also make operating a multilingual site a tricky proposition.
To cope with various dialects, eHealth Latin America has developed its own generic language. So far, it's worked very well. Companies with offices spread around the globe can usually rely on their own workers to translate English documents into local languages. But organizations with no overseas branches typically outsource some or all of their translation work. Yet outsourcing is hardly a panacea, since translation services tend to be expensive, quality-challenged operations that can take a long time to deliver text.