Have you ever wondered why translation of your website is so important for your business? If so, this article is for you.

Today, we’ll tackle how to make your designs better with website translation by showing you what website translation is, and why working with website translation services is key to your success. We’ll show you how to find the right website translation services, and how to vet these website translation services.

According to CSA Research in 2014, 56% say the ability to obtain information in their native language is more important than the price. That’s because, according to the same source, 75% of consumers will pick websites that show information in their language. English-only websites are only 25.9% of the entire internet space. It’s clear that translation is sorely needed for your website to succeed.

Now that you’ve seen what website translation services can do for your business by making consumers choose your translated website, let’s take a closer look at website translation.

What is website translation

Website translation is a special type of translation service that builds multilingual websites from scratch. Website translation services are more than just translating. It means providing solutions to all your website problems by making your website easily understandable by native language consumers.

• Code – Every website comes with a great development team, but did you know that code also needs to be ready for translation? Getting your code ready for translation is part of the process of internationalization. I18n, or internationalization, requires string extraction, framework review, dynamic UI expansion, and resource file preparation.
• Website Structure – Translating your website requires prepping for the right website structure. Choose between subdomains, CCTLD, and subdirectories. Doing this will create microsites within your website, which all can be localized for a specific region. When you create your website structure, you should have in mind which locales you’ll be translating for: how many, where, and how.
• Specific Locales – Which brings us to our next point. Instead of focusing on just the languages, you should make sure to focus on the regions. The locales you’re focusing on will affect other areas of your website translation, such as content or UX. Localizing for your regions are important to any translated websites, but can even go beyond websites to social media and email marketing.
• UX – Thinking about the UX of your multilingual website is crucial if you’re going to implement a user-centered design. What do users expect from their designs? When building a multilingual website, UX is part of gaging how usable your website is, how much time they spend on your website, and how much they engage with your website.

After the first initial considerations, then, website translation goes through a few steps to achieve:

• Market Research – Market research is the first pertinent step when it comes to translating your website into a multilingual website. From keyword research to competitor analysis, to full market conditions, you have to know your local market in order to truly target it for website translation. Then you can see the likelihood of your prospects in that language region becoming successful.
• Design – Language list placement, browsing methods, and more, which we’ll talk about in the next section. You need to consider how your users will be accessing your site, and how they will view your site, more importantly. You need to see whether what you have on your site will convince them to connect with your services or products, and that’s through UX and design.
• Core Content Creation – For your core content creation, you’ll be needing a content strategy and relevant, informative content. Localized content is best for translated websites, because it allows you to target your website’s audience with your translated and localized content.
• Design Localization – With localized market research, you should also localize your design. We’ll talk about this in more detail in the next section. What’s important to note is that it’s necessary to localize your design according to region.
• Content Localization – After creating your content, you have to ascertain that the content is localized to the target audience and regions you’re targeting. For example, you could have South African news content for that web page, or coverage of Japanese food in another web page.

How to make your designs better with website translation

Design is one of the biggest considerations when you’re translating your website, along with market research and content creation. Your website design is part of the UX as well as matched with the content.

With the design aspect in mind, there are various considerations to keep in mind. One, choosing a flexible design; two, language placement; three, using global templates; and four, using images, icons and colors.

Global design templates created with different languages in mind can make for a great website design. Using a global template will keep things consistent, while having different language sections under the global template will transform your website into a multilingual one. A global template will keep things uniform and easy. You’ll have brand consistency throughout.

Another key element is imagery, icons and color. Colors can be tricky, because their meanings vary across different countries, for example, red could mean good luck in Asia, and death in Africa. So, choosing imagery and colors that appeal to certain language demographics is key.

If you’re using flags for icons, it might be better to choose other icons to symbolize different languages, since flags as icons is not a representation of a country, since there may be different languages spoken in that country.

So, keep in mind that an image that is not appropriate in one region can be appropriate in another. For one, a thumbs up may be okay in the US, but not in the Middle East.

Website translation services can make your designs better by allowing website translators to manage not only your website’s translation, but the whole website itself, which includes the design and the UX.

The benefits of website translation

Website translation will open up your website with new languages, which in turn will allow your consumers to relate to your content and design. According to Weglot.com, 60% of customers rarely or never buy from English-only websites.

Translating your website will bring in organic traffic to your website, as well as acquire new clients. In opening up your new website to different languages, it’s easier to attract new clients. And attracting new clients leads to attracting new sources of revenue.

The benefits of website translation services, meanwhile, is it makes it easier for you to become acquainted with translators who will work on your website. These are experts in the industry of website translation as well as experts in the linguistic field, with a hold of two or more languages.

How to find the right website translation services

If you’re going to find the right website translation services, you should consider the best ones. The best translation services are ones that can broaden your horizons to international markets. Website translation services are able to wholly rework your website to become multilingual, working with design, UI and UX aspects of the website.

It’s easy to find the right website translation services online, but finding the right one takes work. Here’s a few things you have to keep in mind:

1. Word-of-Mouth – Finding a website translation service should be easy if you have heard from someone who’s used their services. Word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to find a website translation service, and usually the most common. Someone might have a good word-of-mouth review for a translation service, and then may recommend it for you.
2. Google – If you Google “website translation services near me,” you can find the most popular translation services in your area, or in the world. Go for the ones that have good reviews, a great portfolio, and good customer service.
3. Website – The translation services should have a great website, if they’re going to be handling yours. Make sure to take a good look at their website, their specialties within website translation, and what people have to say about them. Then contact their support team for more information, or to request a quote.

How to Vet Your Website Translation Services

If you’re going to vet your website translation services, make sure to compare and contrast their website translation work based on these following areas:

1. Industry Expertise – When you’re looking for website translators, make sure the translation services you need are the ones who do have this expertise, or you might get stuck with a legal or medical translator who doesn’t know how to translate websites. Make sure the translation services you use have website translation as an expertise.
2. Linguistic Expertise – Of course, when you have your intended languages, you will have to translate, so pick translation services who have translators with linguistic expertise in all your target languages.
3. Reviews – Compare and contrast your translation services based on reviews. On their websites, you can see whether they’ve been good to their clients. Every legitimate translation service should have reviews on their websites, as proof of their services. Read the reviews and compare.
4. Portfolios – Same goes for portfolios. Ask for your intended translator’s portfolio, to see whether they’ve worked on a similar project before. Look at their portfolios to see the quality, consistency, and accuracy of their translation projects. If you haven’t already, ask the website translation services for their translator’s portfolios.
5. Project Management – If you’re working on a translation project, the project managers will be your friend. They’re the ones who will oversee your translation project from start to finish. Project managers, plan, execute, oversee, and close out the website translation project. That’s why it’s important to ask and vet who the project managers will be for your project.
6. Customer Service – A key to a translation project is customer service. You’d ideally like 24/7 customer support, so that your concerns can be dealt with immediately. If not, at least one that responds within 30 minutes, or has a live chat capability.

Conclusion

It’s pertinent to note that website translation is a tricky matter, because there are so many elements to take into account. There’s content, there’s design, there’s translation quality and terminology.

Yet, once it’s done, website translation services can increase your revenue, because as we’ve shown in the introduction, you can increase your brand visibility to consumers by simply translating your website.

But website translation is not just simple translation. It’s a step-by-step process that includes design, development, and content marketing. Once you have all that down pat, with website translation services, then you can look forward to more traffic, more reach, and more consumers for your website.