You want your website’s messaging to be effective and impactful. But things can get sticky when you move beyond automated translation tools to professionally translate website content into other languages if you aren’t set up for successful translation.
Here are 5 tips to help things go smoothly when working with a website translation agency.
5 Quick Tips for Website Translation
1. When possible, choose a translation-friendly web platform.
Content management systems like WordPress make it easy to create a multilingual site. They allow you to integrate plugins such as WPML to:
- Easily collaborate with translators
- Manage multilingual content
- Import/export content for use with a translation management or memory tool
However, if you build your site with something like Google Sites, you will be out of luck, as these types of translation plugins aren’t available. While Google Translate is available in this instance, this tool usually leaves a lot to be desired.
2. Keep a tech-savvy person in your corner
Website plugins make your life easier, but they’re not truly plug and play. Even the best website translation plugins require configuration for your site and, like everything, they’re not going to do the work for you. And, sometimes, there are pages or website components built using other plugins or tools that require manual integration (and sometimes straight up copy and paste) with the translation plugin
It’s important to have someone that knows their way around the back end or your website and is familiar with when and how content is produced on an ongoing basis. This will help big time when you’re working with a website translation agency.
3. Remember images and downloadable content
If you’re making the investment of both time and money in website translation, make sure you provide your translation agency partner with images and downloadable documents to be translated.
Web tools only capture the content on the pages, not what’s in linked pages, text embedded within graphics, or other files. Without also translating these materials as well, site visitors will have on-page text translated to their preferred language, but be unable to take advantage of any multimedia or additional content. Web-based and downloadable forms are another commonly overlooked area.
4. Keep design in mind
4. Keep design in mindWhen content is translated from English into other languages, it often expands or contracts in length.
Spanish, for example, takes roughly 30% more words to convey the same message as English. Accordingly, this impacts space required on a page or in a designed image. So, it’s important to keep the differences in languages in mind for things like buttons, headers, and overall layout when developing your design if you’re planning for website translation.
When needed, a translation agency can assist with layout of translated text in multilingual graphics.
5. Work with final content and avoid changes mid-process
It’s always best to send the final version of the website for translation. If you need to update content throughout the process or make changes after the website is complete, do your best to track changes (or at least note which pages they are on) and let your translation team know so they can organize work accordingly.
Questions You Might Have When Translating Your Site
What does quality control look like?
We’ve all seen humorous articles, like this one, where translation efforts have gone terribly awry. Fortunately, a professional website translation company can implement quality assurance steps, which promote accuracy.
Utilizing translation memory tools , (human) translators will translate each part of your website copy, broken into small pieces. Then, when new content is added to a website, the translator can draw on previously translated material to support consistency in language across pages. This same translation memory can be used to support translation of your other documents, too.
Do I have to pay for everything, even the repetitive content?
The answer is: not always.
Website translation companies will analyze all the web content and look for repetitive phrases used across pages and, more importantly, content that is templates and used identically throughout the website.
For example, if the same footer or menu appears on every single page, they can usually translate the words only once, which means you pay only once even though the content appears across pages.
Still need more help for website translation?
Alboum provides document and website translation for nonprofits, as well as education, public health and reproductive health organizations across the United States and around the world.
With nearly 100 languages available, Alboum offers solutions that fit our clients unique needs, including multilingual graphic design and website translation engineering experts.
If you’d like to learn more about how Alboum can help with your website translation, please reach out today.
