Remember that this isn’t a quick and easy task. Adapting your existing website’s text into other languages is not as simple as translating text. It’s critical to adopt a culture’s unique way of speaking.
To accomplish this, here are some steps you can take to prepare for a smooth and successful website localization.
Decide What You Need to Translate (and What You Don’t)
Depending on how much information is on your site, not everything actually needs to be translated. For example, if your site features a blog or news section, is it important for international readers to access these posts? And if so, do all of the blog posts need to be translated?
Spending time translating posts that might as well be archived will eat up time, and it’s likely your international viewers won’t need to access these old blog posts or news reports. If you feature a forum on your site, most likely hosted by a third party, is it important that all of the forum posts are translated? Perhaps it is just necessary to translate the forum’s interface and not all the content.
Being selective about what to translate by identifying what information is important for international viewers to read will save you time you could be spending on localizing your important information.
Adding subtitles to videos requires a separate software and process entirely. To speed up translation, do you have a script from the video’s production or a translation text prepared? Do all the videos need to be subtitled, or is dubbing possible?
Images with embedded text are more difficult to localize than video, as search engines can’t read and translate image text. For SEO purposes, it’s best to avoid using embedded text in images altogether. But if you already have these images and don’t want to spend extra time creating new ones with translated text, translate the image’s alt text instead.
Translate Linked Documents
It’s likely that your website has PDF documents that should be accessible or downloadable to your visitors. If you decide these should be translated, attempt to locate the original Word, Excel, or Photoshop file to make your process more efficient. This way, you won’t have to recreate the document or copy and paste all of the text onto a new document, and then have it translated.
Importing vs Exporting Content
Exported content is preferred on websites. While content management systems (CMS) are helpful to website creators, they prevent us from using the translation software that’s most efficient for website localization. Is it possible to export your site’s text and then import the newly translated information? This significantly speeds up the translating process for everyone.
We understand that website localization is difficult, and because not every site is designed with localization in mind, adapting information from one language into another can be messy. We strive to optimize website localization for all our clients and help them decide what information is important to translate, as well as how to prepare for the localization process in the future.
How to Localize Apps?
Using app localization to its best advantage is vital to any business seeking to move into international markets and maximize app downloads. The easiest way is to follow our Apps Localization checklist.
