Asking Right Questions for Successful multilingual Website

So, you did your market research and found one of the current markets has huge demand and growth potential for your business. Now the most obvious and required thing to do here is to get your website multilingual. As a business, you understand that every ounce of effort that you put in is intended to generate more customers, and more customers mean more sales. Following the current trends, you also have understood that most people like to buy from the businesses, brands, or websites that provide information about the product and themselves in the native or preferred language of the customers. Well, making a website multilingual directly increases traffic and reach or visibility of the website, hence, more leads from the target region. However, it's much easier said than done. Making your website multilingual can be tricky. Therefore, based on its experience, LanguageNoBar – the professional translation agency has accumulated a few very crucial questions that you must ask or get an answer for when planning to go multilingual with your website.

Where to begin with website translation?

If you are not just going all out and translating your website into every popular language, then you must consider and prioritize the market and its native language. Identifying the market and language is crucial not only for translation but also for the effectiveness of your localization strategy.

When should you do it?

Let’s assume you want a multilingual website at some point in the future but not now. As of now you are just building or redesigning your website and languages will be added later. Well, that plan isn’t an ideal one. In business thinking ahead of time has been beneficial to many and therefore, the best time to make your website multilingual is probably when you are building it or redesigning it.

What’s the ideal turnaround time for website translations?

Well, that would be a good question to ask. However, there is no actual span of days or weeks one can define as the ideal time for website translation and localization. Depending on factors like the volume of content to be localized, the complexity of the website, and many others, the time duration varies. But if you are running short on time or have a product rollout scheduled, you can ask your translation partner to get more teams to work on your project. A professional localization services agency like LanguageNoBar would definitely live up to its salt by getting a dedicated project manager supervising the works of multiple teams and completing the task within the scheduled time. 

Can your Internal Resources do the translations?

You might think that it would be better to get your sales or other reps who are bilingual or know how to talk to customers to translate your website. Well, you can go with them if you think only knowing your product and company would be enough to do the job. Your reps are good at their job to let them do better in that. Translating website content and localizing them requires a very specific level of knowledge and expertise. You might argue that a translation services provider might not know your company, but understand that they know the industry, perhaps they might have worked previously for your competitor even. Also, your in-house resources might be able to pull off the translation but that will take at least double time and give not even half the quality, of what a professional translation agency would provide you.

Who from your team needs to be on board and when?

Your development team needs to be in regular contact with your translation agency while translating your website. You must make sure that your development team is on-board with the translation team right from the beginning of the whole process.

Who should be assigned to coordinate the whole process?

From our experience, you can always assign one of your managers, say, a digital marketing manager, to coordinate with the translation team and help to regulate the process more smoothly. However, a professional website translation agency would like to be in touch with other members of your team, for instance, the author of the content, your current content writer, etc. to get a better understanding of their ideas and expectations.

Why do you need a style guide, glossaries, etc., for translations?

It is always beneficial to have a style guide defining your tone and explaining how you want to approach your customers. It helps to ensure that nothing gets lost in the translation or nothing piggybacks its way in. Style guides and glossaries are usually found with the marketing team as they set the tone and style for the articles, blogs, and other marketing material. Involving them in the process could boost up the speed. Understand that Localization is a wholesome process, and almost everyone has some part to play in it.

How can you avoid overspending on website translation?

As mentioned in the previous answer, website translation and localization are a wholesome process, therefore, you need everyone to play their part effectively. For as simple as maintaining a continuous flow of communication and information you could save up a lot of money. Having a clear flow of communication between your in-house teams and the translation partners & linguists ensures long-term benefits. In addition to saving you money, it also rules out the possibilities of further spendings in the near future regarding the same.

What to Consider when budgeting for website localization?

While budgeting for website localization, you might want to consider answering this – whether you want your homepage to be translated into multiple languages or the whole website translated into one or two languages? This is a very crucial question, as many people do not understand its impact. You can get your website’s homepage translated into multiple languages for cheap but doesn’t this means that you are cheating on your visitors. You lure them by showing your home page in their native language while the rest of the other pages and information remain in their original language. This way traffic might increase but conversion won’t.

Why Google Translate or any automated translation is not enough?

Don’t fall for this trap. Be it Google or any other machine translation for that matter, regardless of how developed they are, they still need human intervention. Machine translations may be cheap and you might be on a tight budget, but having poorly translated content on your website would permanently damage your brand reputation. Although human translation is comparatively slow but it has accuracy and understanding. Expert manual translation services not only ensure the accuracy of the content but also its cultural viability, something that automated translations may be able to comprehend.

So, now whenever you plan for your website localization or the translation you know what questions to ask and what factors to work on. Multilingual websites are the need of the hour and having a responsive multilingual website would certainly put you ahead of your competition.