Translating Your Website to Attract New Global Customers

By Michael Kriz

Right now, major U.S. brands are looking for ways to grow their profits by marketing their goods and services beyond borders. Eager customers from China to Brazil are open to buying from U.S. brands, especially if those brands make an effort to translate their digital content.

The odds are you already have a few global customers. Whether you provide Software as a Service (SaaS), create apps for Android and iOS, or deal in ecommerce, your analytics probably show that some of your international customers have been using, downloading, or shipping your products in English. Studies, however, repeatedly show that the overwhelming majority of global customers prefer to purchase from websites in their own language.

At this stage of your company's growth, translation could be a defensive measure for your brand, enabling you to establish a digital presence in countries before savvy local competitors snap up your potential market share.

Are you ready to beat these competitors to the punch by investing in a multilingual website? Let’s look at the three essential phases of translating your web content to your future customers around the world.

1. Select a Translation Partner

If you’re trying to figure out what time a restaurant closes in Berlin, Google Translate may be perfectly fine for that purpose. But if you’re trying to launch your brand internationally, replicating the nuances of your copy, imaging, and brand positioning for new customers, it’s best to leave the free automated tools behind. Quality translation is an investment in your brand, and an early faux pas could cost you major revenue.

A simple web search will return thousands of translation options, but picking the right one can make the difference between success and disaster. Look for a professional translation agency that can satisfy the following requirements:

• Demonstrated expertise in your target region and language.

• Linguists with native fluency and subject matter expertise pertinent to your project.

• Advanced “translation-memory” technology. TM will provide savings from reused text as well as ownership of the underlying content database.

• A clear grasp of complex project management and best practices, including managing content updates and integrating with global-ready content management systems (CMS).

• The capacity to run projects on a 24/7 cycle if your website updates are time-sensitive. (This is accomplished by teams distributed across international time zones.)

It’s an added bonus if the agency is also willing to integrate members of their team with your own in-house staff to facilitate communication and project efficiency.

2. Prepare for the Translation Project

Translation projects actually involve two distinct processes. Linguistically, translation refers to the process of expressing your English-only thoughts and ideas in the target language. This focuses on making meaning, and may very well deviate from the literal when idioms and humor don’t translate well.

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The second process is localization, where images, colors, interface choices, and content strategy get vetted by your translation agency for cultural appropriateness. Icons, stock photos, certain color palettes, and other design details may come across as strange or inappropriate to your international buyers, and the agency can help you make culturally-informed decisions to improve how your brand is perceived and received around the world.

Before linguists and designers get to work, you’ll want to coordinate the following with your translation partner:

• Communicate your voice and business objectives. Great translation requires that your agency’s team understand your company’s goals and brand positioning.

• Audit your website for any localization issues. Is there anything in your current design that might undermine your brand internationally? How can the imagery be improved and targeted for your market? Are there any glaring taboos?

• Manage costs. Discuss controlling costs by analyzing your U.S.-based content and narrowing it down to what is essential internationally versus what is applicable to U.S. audiences. This may include product selections or services you don’t plan on launching internationally quite yet.

• Assign points of contact. Define who owns the project within your company and who will be the point(s) of contact with the translation agency. Get the core team synchronized in a kickoff meeting.

3. The Translation Process

Trust that your agency has managed major web translation projects in the past. Here’s a sample of what to expect along the way:

• Picking an internationally-friendly CMS. The content management system must be able to handle character sets for your target language(s) and provide tools that facilitate efficiently managing local and global content, including integrating with the process for translation and review.

•  Managing content for translation. Once you’ve decided what gets translated and when, project managers will establish workflows designed to keep content organized and flowing through the translation process. If updates are frequent, it will pay to integrate the workflow between your CMA and translation provider’s systems via their API.

• Addressing user interface and navigation issues. Text in translation can expand or contract depending on the target language. This can have a direct impact on your navigation buttons, bars, menus, and form fields; it may also lead to changes in site architecture or UI design choices.

• Taking the time for quality assurance (QA) testing. Translations are guaranteed to be good, but you’ll want your provider to evaluate the work in situ to ensure everything came together in context and visually, and preferably with in-country reviewers who can confirm that their preferences are reflected in the final content.

The work doesn’t end when your site is launched, but launching the right way will make a big difference in first impressions you make. Once you are live, you’ll want to promote your site for visibility via global SEM/SEO, run local language ad campaigns, and implement a global social strategy -- but one thing at a time. For now, start with translating your website into the most critical languages for your business objectives — and see where the new revenues take you.