|
|
| Website translation |
 |
Website translation has several challenges, both when planning the translation and maintaining the site at later stages, but it can produce great rewards when done correctly. To access a global market, your web marketing has to be presented in a format that is both accessible to, and comprehensible by, a global audience. The basis of this is presenting content in the language of the end user.
The two keys to successful global web marketing:
Website content needs to be in the language the target audience understands.
A Japanese student wanting to study English abroad needs to access information in the Japanese language. Your business needs to provide your customers with the opportunity to learn about your product or service in their first language.
Website needs to be easily found by the target customer
Over 80% of all web sessions start with a search engine enquiry. Your site has to rank highly on the search engines in the language of your target market. If you want to raise brand awareness of your product in Germany, you need to be ranking highly on the German language search engines.
Translating a website can be a simple, painless process, if it is planned for and allowances are made in advance for both the structure and appearance of different languages. There are a variety of issues to consider; these are best considered before you build your master site, but can be applied after the fact.
Foreign Language Search Engine Optimization.
If this is part of your marketing program, do your keyword research first before you start translating. This will save time and money as it is often more efficient to write optimized copy from scratch than it is to adapt existing copy with new terms.
Translating Text in graphics.
Minimize or eliminate text from any graphics in the site. Why? Firstly, it is more expensive to translate within a graphics file (requires special skills and appropriate localized software) and, from experience, many people do not keep or lose the original source graphic files, meaning the translation company has to re-create these and this takes time and money. Plus, a search engine cannot index any text in a graphic file.
Navigation links.
Design for the fact that a sentence of 72 characters in English may be double that in another language (or half for that matter!). Check your link names in your target languages before you design your site, so that you can design for extended phrases or alter link names if required.
Translating body text.
Much as in Navigation links, different languages will take up different amounts of space. For example, in Thai, there are no spaces between words and no punctuation. Sentences are begun on a new line rather than separated by a period/full stop. This can make a big difference to the amount of space a given amount of text will take up. Inslating Navigation links.
Design for the fact that a sentence of 72 characters in English may be double that in another language (or half for that matter!). Check your link names in your target languages before you design your site
Translating Brand/product names.
Decide at the beginning what you want to do with these. You have three options. First, leave them in English within the translated text. Second, transliterate them into the phonetic equivalent in the foreign language character set. Transliteration means taking the sounds of your brand name, and representing those sounds in the character set of the foreign language. Third, translate them. Here you create a new brand/product name in the target language. This can be particularly valuable when you have a brand name that relates to the product in question: you can include target keywords within the product name.
Design so that you can present customized content by language.
Your product/service’s appeal, points of difference etc. may well differ between cultures. Colours and images etc. should be able to be varied between language sites. Ideally you want to be able to present your product in a way that is localized for the target market. But, always maintain a master version of all content in your language (e.g. English) so you can refer to that content when it needs updating (see below).
Give the translator the freedom to write for the target market.
A good marketing oriented translator will think long and hard about how to present your web marketing copy in a manner appropriate for the target market. Don’t ask for a strict or direct translation; at best it will come out “clumsy”, at worst unintelligible.
Design a mechanism for tracking changes.
If your website is ever going to be updated, you need a mechanism to track those changes and then ensure that they are applied across the various languages. Your Korean customers would not take kindly to finding out that prices have changed after they placed an order, because someone forgot to update the Korean site. Your site needs to present consistent information across all languages.
Be realistic.
If you only translate one screen of your site, what does that say about your commitment to that market? If you searched for and found an appealing product online, but discovered that 90% of the information presented about the product was unintelligible, would you purchase or even make an enquiry?
|
|
|
|