Dear language friend, the holidays are here and the LingoStar team wishes you and yours all the best this holiday season! We hope that the upcoming celebrations bring joy, happiness, and love. We also hope that you enjoy this newsletter and find a lot of useful information regarding the translation of a website to help your business prosper in 2015.

Have you ever wondered why certain websites immediately pop up in Google when you are searching for information, and others fall behind even though they contain more useful content? It is not just a random ranking. The way websites are ranked is a result of the work of web developers and language specialists.

In today’s world of globalization, where websites play such an important role in business and communication, it is crucial to always improve your website, so that it meets the interests of the target audience. What makes websites successful and attractive for international communities is website translation. The company that invests in the translation of its website gains credibility and trust and draws clients’ attention.

However, translation of a website isn’t as simple as it seems.

To target a specific audience, companies should create a strategy for search engine optimization (SEO). This is a wonderful tool that helps websites become visible and more appealing to customers. Search engines like Google rank web pages, videos, and other content based on what it considers to be most relevant to users.

When translating a website, it is not enough just to translate its content into other languages. To make it culturally appropriate, companies localize their websites. The source website is modified to adjust to the preferences of regular users. Furthermore, the localized versions have to match the requirements of users of different languages and cultures. For example, people from different countries will use different sets of keywords when searching for the same kind of information. Using the same set of keywords for all the localized versions of the website might undermine its position in the ranking.

The process of website translation and localization is very complex and requires a professional approach.

A huge mistake is to entrust this massive work to machine translation tools, for example, Google Translate. No matter how advanced this technology is, it just cannot take into account all the cultural nuances. First, machine translation tools quite often provide a very poor translation. Therefore, the quality of the text translated by Google Translate will never match the quality and uniqueness of the original text. Secondly, adding Google Translate to your website might be against Google established rules. Besides, websites that use this method of translation are often marked as ‘non-quality’ websites. As a result, they fall down in the results page ranking. Finally, it can influence your set of keywords because machine translation can turn logical phrases and word combinations into nonsensical words. This is definitely not the best way to raise your website in the ranking.

As you can see, website localization can be complicated.

The localization process includes two steps. The first step is to adjust the features of the product according to the target market’s requirements: translation of the textual content, dates, measurements, punctuation, addresses, currency, etc. The second step includes adjusting the aesthetic appeal, images, colors, etc. in such a way that they make foreign users feel comfortable when working with the website. It is also crucial that the translator who works with your website content is a native speaker of the language of the region for which you want to localize the website. Everything has to be comprehensible and sound natural to the target audience. Moreover, even dialects of the same language may vary, and what is understandable for the speaker of Canadian English will sound weird to the person speaking Australian English. So every company has to carefully choose their translators and know for sure who they are working with.

What you need to do before launching the website

Before launching the website, you need to research the target market thoroughly and find out which terms users use when they are searching for particular products in their native language. These can be not only words and phrases, but also acronyms and abbreviations. This will help you get a clear picture of what customers are expecting from you and what they want to find on your website. After you have created the list of keywords for the target market, you can start translating and localizing the website.

Another question is why companies need to translate the whole website when they can just translate the set of keywords and get traffic to their websites? If you have a product that you want to be sold abroad, it is crucial to present this product or services in a proper way using the language of the audience. Website translation allows customers to get a clear understanding of what the product is. When a company meets customers’ needs and interests, it gains credibility and increases sales orders and transactions.

Getting your website successfully translated and SEO-friendly may seem difficult at first, but it is possible. Research the target market properly and find a professional translation agency. These two elements are necessary to make your website attractive and increase the revenue of your company.

LingoStar is always ready to help you translate your website and make it SEO-friendly. We work with language professionals who can provide effective translation and localization services into over 100 languages. We can help you go global and increase your sales! Call us today at 604-629-8420 or send us an email at info@lingo-star.com to get more information.