Are you looking to translate a website in order to expand your sales overseas? Do you already have customers in other countries but feel that you are not getting the level of sales that you are expecting? Could this be due to a lack of information in your clients’ own language?
Research has shown that people are far more likely to be interested in websites translated in their own language. One of the golden rules of marketing is that you should make it as easy as possible for potential customers to approach you.
Translating your website is a first step in making your products and services available to a much wider audience, and therefore increasing your sales.
Website Translation vs. Localisation
Website localisation is the translation and adaptation of pages, text and graphics so that they are culturally appropriate in the target market. This could include layout (left-to-right vs. right-to-left), menu structures, conversion paths, and even address fields at checkout.
Translating, on the other hand, focuses on simply rendering the words in another language for comprehension.
There are many aspects that need to be taken into consideration when translating and localising a website into another language. Even the colours and images you use need to be appropriate for the target locale.
For this reason, any linguist or collaborator that is involved in the project will be resident in the country for which the website is intended. We can help to advise you about this and source the right specialist website localisation translators for this.
Website Localisation Process
Many websites run on common Content Management Systems (CMSes). We are often asked to advise on the best plugins or processes to ensure that your content is fully translatable.
We very rarely recommend translating a website in-situ, so will usually recommend extracting the text and sending it out to us to work on outside of the CMS. This ensures that we can use consistent terminology throughout the website localisation process – for example, it’s not ideal when translating a webpage to use “Contact Us” in one place and then refer and link to the same page as “Send us a Message” elsewhere, as this could confuse users or even harm website conversions on the translated website.
Extracting the text will allow us to load it into specialist software and manage the terminology across multiple pages, ensuring consistency and adherence to any style guides you may have.
However, copying and pasting the text from your website into Word may not be the best way of sending the website for translation, as metadata and special text may be missed (alt text, strings in JavaScript code, etc.). Please get in touch to discuss your options for preparing and sending the text out for translation.
Common Website Localisation File Formats
We typically work with extracts from CMSes such as WordPress, Drupal, Typo3 and Tridion, as well as custom-built content management systems. These tend to come to us in the following file types:
- XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format)
- XML (Custom formatted)
- HTML
- Excel
- JSON
- YAML
We can work in all of these formats, and return the file back to you fully translated and localised, according to your specification.
Is Website Localisation Worth It?
In many cases, translating a website can provide a very favourable return on investment if the website translating is properly targeted and executed.
Translating a website and keeping the localised versions up to date can become more and more expensive as your site grows and the number of locales you target increases.
If the website is particularly large, you might want to consider just translating the key pages. Comms Multilingual can help you with every aspect of preparation for website translation and provide advice on how much text should be translated.
Multilingual SEO Services
If you want your website to feature on search engines in your target market, it is very important not to forget about search engine optimisation of your site. You have probably done this for your English site; it is equally important to do the same multilingual SEO for any foreign language versions.
We can provide multilingual SEO services, including the researching of potential keywords and ensuring that they are used in the web page translations.
Website Media Translation
As videos are becoming more and more important for search engine rankings, you may want to consider having some short video clips on your site.
Comms Multilingual can offer multilingual subtitling services to caption your videos and make them accessible to viewers in other languages, or we can provide multilingual voiceovers or dubbing to make them appear more native.
We can provide you with sample voices, so that you can choose the most appropriate ones for your message. We will then translate the script, record the voices and provide you with the videos completely ready to publish on your site or a video hosting platform.
Website Localisation Pricing
Our pricing is primarily based on the word count and languages requiring translation, although any multimedia translation and multilingual SEO required will affect the cost.
In the first instance, please contact us and send us the full site or the pages for translation, either by e-mail or FTP, as well as the URL so that we can take a look at the site or a staging/development site.
We need to have the full site from you so that we can be sure we have all the pages that need to be translated and localised, which will enable us to do an accurate word and page count. Please also send us the original of any graphics files or other assets that need to be localised.
