The internet is fast dominating the world as the go-to platform for information, products, and services. If your business is on the web, it has the potential to reach almost anyone, anywhere. Or does it?
A multilingual website is a beneficial tool for those business owners with a broader market, or who are wishing to expand globally. Multilingual website translation is essentially the translation and localization of your entire websites content, creating a user-friendly site for your desired international audience. If you prefer not to engage the services of a website translation company and would rather do it yourself, follow these web localization best practices for a successful launch.
How to do it right:
Come up with a strategic website translation workflow
Translating your website is a big task; it’s not going to happen with a click of a button, and it could be frustrating at many stages. Before you begin, we suggest creating a strategic workflow, or plan of action to ensure the smoothest possible deployment of your new and improved multilingual site.
In the process of implementing your multilingual website, keeping your brand safe should be a priority. Consider an MVP (minimal viable product) approach. Start small and focus on translating a bite-sized, but an essential part of your website. Translate the home page or product page first, considering what website content is most important to your brand and its primary message, and prioritize. These are pages, functions, and headlines that your website relies on to keep customers engaged. Focus on translating these sections into digestible content for your new audience before the less important details. Keeping customers on the page in the process of translation should be a priority. Once you have an order of importance for the rollout, the process feels much more manageable without compromising too much of the website’s functionality.
Use automation
Manually exporting and reimporting (including copy & pasting) the content from your website costs you time, potential mistakes and possibly money. To help you with this part of the process, consider one of the following methods:
- Use an API (Application Program Interface) and content connectors available to automate your website content smoothly.
- Use a CMS Translation plugin such as WPML (WordPress Multilingual). The plugin works inside your CMS, enabling you to set up for specific language encoding. It also allows you to export and re-import in a localization friendly format (e.g. XLIFF) for pages and sections of your choice, localize titles and metadata, hooks up directly to a TMS via API, and also marks target content requiring updates on account of the source content being changed.
- Use a Proxy solution: If you only have a small team, and are looking for the hands-off approach and SEO isn’t the be-all and end-all, and you don’t mind your localized website being stored on an external server, proxy solutions are an interesting alternative. They work by essentially mirroring your source website and enabling you to replace content with localized content. In addition, proxy solutions have features that detect web updates and additions, enabling efficient workflows to be put in place.
Know your audience and your languages accordingly
Who is your target audience? What is their language? Understanding your audience's cultural nuances is just as important as knowing what language they speak. The translation of your website should consider all aspects of communication, including text, grammar, visual pictures, and the social norms of the audience. The goal is not to compromise the quality of your website and its message. Enlisting the aid of a native speaker is a big advantage. Providing valuable insights that no level of technology can, combining their knowledge with state-of-the-art language applications is a winning formula for a highly successful localization launch.
Tip: Consider a culturalization review to ensure that the source content is suitable for your target markets - including image choices, color, layout, font and consider making necessary customizations.
Your brand’s message and tone
A new audience shouldn’t mean your brand returns to its infancy stages. If your brand is already well established, this should show through during the localization. Localizing your website in a new market is a massive job and marketing can sometimes take a backseat. Your brand’s message must be centre stage with marketing preparations in place well before your new consumers land on your site.
The character or essence of a brand can easily become lost in translation and inevitably cost business--not an ideal start. Any part of your marketing, including email campaigns and landing pages, should be localized in line with the rest of your website, keeping consistency with your branding. Marketing your brand is crucial when entering new and unfamiliar territory and engaging your new customers in their language creates a solid foundation for success.
Tip: To enable clients to stay on-brand, Andovar advocates the development of multilingual brand management assets such as glossaries and multilingual style guides. By documenting approved terminology translations and translation style preferences, these assets enable consistency while accelerating time to market.
Provide context and test your localization
If you have ever tried to translate a sentence from one language to another, you are familiar with the difficulties that arise. It’s not as simple as swapping word for word. Translating can get messy, and the context can get lost. The same applies to the localization of a website, especially when incorporating multiple languages. Implementing in-context translation tools is vital to ensuring smooth deployment of your localized site. Testing is your best friend. By utilizing in-context translation technologies, glitches and catching teething problems are caught before your new site goes live. This saves lots of time by allowing you to rectify issues before they snowball down the line to the customer level.
Take professional help
By following these guides, a D.I.Y. rollout of a multilingual website translation can be manageable, however still a relatively timely and challenging process. To make the transition less stressful, you can hand it over to the professionals by enlisting the help of a website localization agency such as Andovar. We are a global provider of multilingual content solutions, with services ranging from text translation and content creation, through to audio and video recording, turnkey localization websites, software, and games.
Contact Andovar today to discuss your translation needs!
Find out more about website translation strategy in our Ultimate Guide to Website Translation.
