Factors Affecting the Development and Management of Bilingual Web Portals

In recent years, there has been an interest among organizations and institutions to develop bilingual and multilingual web portals that provide their stakeholders with access to content, services and online resources. This study reports findings regarding the development and management of a bilingual web portal that provides content and services for an academic institution in Saudi Arabia (Arabic and English). This study adopts a qualitative research approach for data collection and analysis. Semi-structure interviews were conducted with five people who were involved directly with the bilingual portal development and management. Then, the data were analysed using coding and categorising to identify common themes among the participants. The findings indicate that developing and managing a bilingual web portal represents a challenge to institutions and it has several implications such as resources allocation, translation issues, quality assurance, content currency and some issues related to web portal usability. Finally, the paper provides some recommendations and suggestions for further research.