Website translation is a multidisciplinary practice that involves a lot more than language experts. In fact, the translation process itself is simply one step in a much larger process of optimising a website capable of delivering multilingual content to each language audience.
Of course, you want a quality team of website translators, but you also need developers, content producers, marketers and technical experts to build a fully functional website for multiple languages. In this article, we look at seven things you should look for in any website translation service to cover all of your needs.
Key elements of a good website translation service
When looking for a translation company to provide an end-to-end website translation service, you should expect all of the following to be covered:
- Quality translation: Professional translators for every target language.
- Website localisation: Adapting your website for translation and the delivery of content in each target market.
- Language selection: Developing an intuitive system for language detection and selection on your site.
- Multilingual SEO: Optimising your website to rank in the correct language and search engines for each user.
- Content localisation: Adapting your content strategy to suit the interests of each audience.
- Marketing translation: Creating compelling marketing messages in every language.
- Technology: Tools to create the fastest and most affordable translation process for your website and ongoing projects.
Website localisation is a broad discipline of adapting websites for translation at many levels – from optimising code to make translation efficient to ensuring pages and content are relevant to every target audience (this can include cultural elements, images, numerical values and many other details).
Translated content is powerful when delivered to the right audience at the right time. It is of great importance that websites are optimised for multilingual SEO to ensure the correct language version of a page always shows, whilst avoiding any technical SEO issues related to duplicate content, broken links etc.
Another point that often gets overlooked is content localisation, which relates to the adaptation of your content strategy to match the interests of each audience, topically as well as linguistically.
Website translation is an ongoing process
For companies and websites with ongoing content strategies in place, website translation should also be considered equally as an ongoing process. Every blog post, landing page, advertising campaign, video project and marketing campaign requires translation and adaptation in order to generate the desired results in each target market.
This is the language technology aspect is so important. When businesses use a cost-effective translation system that can quickly support them with the translation of all the content they need, unnecessary expenses can be greatly avoided and time can be saved.
At translate plus, we use a powerful language tech solutions and a translation management system that combines both human and machine translation (dependent on the project and what we have agreed with the client) to deliver a high level of accuracy and as fast as the current machine translation tech allows. We enhance this process further by applying translation memory (TM), which automatically stores translated text and reinserts it anywhere where repetition occurs. So, the system essentially remembers translation so that, when elements like slogans, quotes and definitions are repeated, they are automatically translated without any additional human input.
These technology solutions help us deliver a cost-effective translation service with no compromise in quality. In fact, the longer your project runs, the more data our technology has to work with and the faster we are able to deliver the same type of content with the same level of accuracy.
If you’re currently considering translating your website for a different market and you need help, feel free to get in touch with us.