How human expertise and technology combine to offer a superior solution
Your website is a shop window into your organization. No matter the size of your business your website showcases what you do and how well you do it. It provides a platform for interaction with your customers, both current and prospective, and it tells the world what your brand represents.
What your website communicates about your organization is important.
There are several reasons why translating it into more languages could be beneficial.
Why should you translate your website?
It’s no longer prudent to assume that because your website is in English, it will reach new audiences.
Although English retains its reputation as the language of the World Wide Web, the number of other languages in the digital universe is growing. English is still the most frequently used for web content with just over 50%, but almost half of all websites are written in other languages.
In fact, only 20% of the world’s population speaks English as their native language. When it comes to countries like China and India which have the highest number of internet users, other languages dominate.
The key takeaway here is that for the majority of online users, their preferred language isn’t English.
How does website translation benefit your business?
- Offering your website in different languages helps your business expand into new markets. Making it possible for users to navigate your site in their home language is an effective way to nurture their interest and fidelity. It increases user satisfaction and engagement.
- If you rely on e-commerce sales, ignore language at your peril. It has been consistently shown that website users are more likely to complete a purchase when the buying process takes place in their first language. For any website offering online shopping, a local language buying experience is indispensable.
- By providing content in the languages your customers speak you build trust and as a result, grow positive reviews and recommendations. Your brand identity gains value.
- Investing in new languages is highly beneficial for SEO. By doing careful keyword research and providing relevant and high-quality content in new languages, you strengthen your website’s SERPs in other target language markets and search engines. Put simply, you’re more likely to get seen by a new audience.
- Providing better language options also makes you stand out from your competitors when they don’t do the same. It could give your business a significant edge in a competitive market.
Whatever the size of your organization, creating a website that serves your users, both current and future in their preferred languages is not just an option, it’s essential.
Creating a multilingual site
However big or complex your website is, you invest time, money and energy in creating it. It represents a considerable investment for your company whatever its size and is a top priority for your marketing department. When recreating this valuable website content in other languages, equal care and attention should be paid.
It’s important to choose the translation process that best suits your business. How much you can entrust to machine translation will depend on the type of website content you offer.
Technological advances over the last few years, especially the developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, are helping improve automated translation and change translation workflows. Machine translation (MT) is becoming more accurate and dependable and is helping streamline translation processes. It now plays a key role in how websites are translated.
But when there’s a temptation to entrust the translation process entirely to MT it’s advisable to take a step back and reconsider. Although AI-infused algorithms are good at transferring text into another language, they still don’t deliver humanlike quality. Machines struggle to understand the nuances of language and can trip up over idiomatic expressions or dialects. They sometimes have difficulty putting language into context and can mistranslate keywords.
How does machine translation help?
Where machine translation excels is as a tool to add efficiency and speed.
MT slots nicely into the familiar CAT (computer-aided translation) environment. It integrates with the TMS (translation management system) your language services provider uses and works in harmony with translation memories and terminology databases. It provides translators with invaluable time-saving assistance and reduces the time to market for the customer. It can be trained using customer-specific terminology for precise, customized results and combined with human post-editing when quality is a priority.
In the context of website localization, machine translation is useful for low-impact content like product reviews, customer chat, email messaging or technical documentation like instruction manuals. For e-commerce websites, it can be a real asset when translations are required for thousands of constantly changing product descriptions.
MT is an increasingly versatile tool and a chief element of automation in the website localization workflow. Your language services provider can advise you on how to use it in the most beneficial way for your business.
The advantages of content management systems for translation
Today content management systems (CMS) enable the creation and management of millions of websites. They also make translating them easier.
A CMS is a user-friendly and cost-efficient software program that allows you to build and maintain a website without having to code from scratch. If you have lots of dynamic content and intend to update your website regularly, using a CMS is the obvious solution. Figures show that over 68 million websites are built using a CMS platform.
Translating webpages is straightforward when your CMS is linked to your language partner’s translation management platform via a plugin. Plugins create an automated link for transferring content between the two systems, making the translation process faster and cheaper.
Here at t’works, we’re happy to connect our system to all the major content management platforms using plugins. They allow us to employ our expertise in both human and machine translation and give our customers optimal translation flexibility.
WordPress and TYPO3
WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites and dominates the CMS market. It’s an adaptable, easy-to-use system and free to download. WordPress also helps search engine visibility and SEO. The most popular plugin for translation in WordPress is WPML and it’s the top pick for t’works too.
WPML offers effortless integration between your WordPress-based website and our translation management system. WPML supports 65 languages, with the possibility of adding less common language variants (for example, Mexican Spanish or Canadian French) using the WPML language editor.
And WPML’s translation feature isn’t limited to simply pages and posts. WPML includes custom post types, custom fields, widgets, menus, images, taxonomy, media and even the texts in your site’s admin. It also allows you to choose which strings to translate and can cover the site’s tagline, widget titles and many other texts.
All pages can be optimized for search engines in different languages and the most popular SEO plugins can be integrated, so metrics are easily accessed.
WPML lets you build multilingual and multi-currency e-commerce sites with WooCommerce, meaning your online customers can complete their purchase in their chosen language – from product description to checkout and even confirmation email.
TYPO3 is an open-source CMS that because of its scalability, is often the first choice for enterprise-level use. TYPO3 integrates convenient SEO tools and excellent data security features. It also effectively supports an ‘unlimited number of websites and languages’, thus enabling translation for complex multilingual sites.
t’works uses the plugin Localization Manager (l10nmgr) when translating websites built on TYPO3 software. This integration means no more cut and paste for TYPO3 sites and allows t’works to use its quality-enhancing translation tools. The Localization Manager plugin also enables translators to work with their usual translation memory, terminology database and quality checks and therefore produces superior outcomes. The Localization Manager needs a little more configuration and adaptation to your Typo3 web environment. We have a lot of experience from Typo3 projects with our customers and together with you and our language engineers we easily configure the l10nmgr connector.
By linking the content in your CMS to the translation workflow, plugins like these streamline processes and improve turnarounds. They also, importantly, enable you to mix machine and human translation to get the best value multilingual options for your website.
t’works, your trusted language partner
When it comes to adapting your website to new languages in new target markets, it’s crucial to get a solution tailored to your business. The opportunities that can be accessed through careful adaptation of your site into new languages can bring significant benefits.
At t’works, our experienced project managers and SEO experts will advise you on the best strategy and solution for your site content. By combining the powerful elements of expert human translation, machine translation, technology solutions and plugins, we find the perfect balance for your website localization workflow. We offer you exceptional quality and guaranteed value.
At t’works, we make global easy. To find out more, get in touch with us today.
