Top 5 website translation tips for businesses

Translating the company website is a job that many businesses approach with a certain sense of trepidation. However, it needn’t be a daunting task! Website translation is a great way to reach out to and engage with new customers around the world. All you need to succeed is the right approach and the right support!

Website translation is an important business translation task, as a company’s website is often its main way of connecting with both new and existing customers. That’s why it’s important to ensure that the translation is accurate and that the resulting site mirrors the high quality of the original. In order to achieve this, here are five top website translation tips to help your business ensure that its translation project goes well. 

Focus on audience, not language

With any translation project, it’s easy to get caught up with focusing on the language (or languages) in question. However, website translation is all about connecting with new audiences, so that should be at the heart of the project. Keeping your audience in mind goes further than thinking about which language they would like to read, watch or hear information in. As such, it’s time to start researching!

Different cultures respond in different ways to the same information. A slick marketing campaign that enjoys success in one country can quickly fall flat in another if the sentiment isn’t right. As such, understanding what motivates your audience and how best to speak to them is a key part of successfully delivering a website in another language. Should the copy be overtly salesy or not? Should the language used be simple and to the point or more effusive? Such decisions will need to feed into the translation process in order to achieve the perfect website for your target audience. 

Take care of the technical 

Some languages use different characters than your own. As such, you may need to confirm that the platform that hosts the original language version of your site can support the additional language(s) that you wish to publish it in. It’s essential to find this out at an early stage of the project, so that you can develop a workaround if necessary. 

Avoid machine translation

As a professional translation company with high standards, there are very few (if any) situations where we would recommend relying on machine translation. This is particularly true when it comes to your company website. Website copy needs to be word perfect. The quality of the text on your site will impact on the experience that every single visitor has. The poor grammar resulting from machine translation has no place on a professional company’s website. 

Map out ALL of your needs 

Website translation is about more than just translating the text on the main pages of your site. From your legal information to any videos that you use on the site, it’s important to map out precisely what you need translated from the outset. Remember your blog posts too – content marketing is just as important in other countries as it is in your home nation! 

By mapping out your needs, the translation agency can provide you with an accurate quote and a realistic timeframe for the project. Adding items to the translation once the process is underway is a sure-fire way to see your deadline slip, so be clear from the outset what you need. 

Localize your content

In addition to translating your website, it’s important to localize it. Localization ensures that the content is appropriate to the target audience. That might mean changing currency symbols and date and time formats, for example. Localization extends to imagery as well, so be sure that the images on the target language version of your website are appropriate to its new audience, as well as the copy. 

Final thoughts 

With a proactive approach to planning, your company website translation project can run smoothly and result in a superb quality translation. Feel free to contact the Tomedes team to find out more!