Should You Translate Your Web Content into Other Languages?
Having your own websites provides you with amazing business opportunities around the world; it only makes sense to take advantage of those opportunities in the fullest ways possible.
While having your website available in well-written English is a good first step, there are plenty of people who will visit your site who do not speak English as their first or second language. Will these visitors be likely to purchase your goods or services, or return in the future?
To Translate or Not?
Many people decide to forgo having their website translated because there are instant translators that visitors can use, such as Google Translate.
Unfortunately, these services leave much to be desired. Because the words are just run through a program, with no input from a human translator, the translated text is generally riddled with grammatical errors and other mistakes. The text that you have worked so hard perfecting in order to explain your products, services, and company, is lost in translation.
Top Reasons to Translate Content
If you are interested in expanding your business, regionally or internationally, it is very wise to have your content available in multiple languages.
Even in American cities, there are many individuals who do not speak English fluently. In Los Angeles alone, there are over 100 languages spoken. When these individuals visit your website, it is important that they are able to receive your message and understand your words in a language that is familiar to them.
Whether you are trying to expand globally or not, translating your text can allow more customers to understand how your services work and why they are beneficial.
There are many other reasons to translate your text and have it available for a wider audience. Check out a few of these reasons below:
- Boost revenue and traffic – Translating lets you grow traffic, attract new audiences, and increase conversions. It also lets international leads download content, fill out forms, and speak with sales.
- Desire to do business abroad – Providing localized info will help support international customers. If they understand payment methods, can read product descriptions, and navigate account options, it’s more likely they’ll become customers.
- Differentiate your brand from the competitors – When you translate your content, you get an advantage over competitors who do not. It’s a great way to enter new markets before companies that offer the same things.
- Keep up with the competition – If competitors are already offering content in another language, you want to do the same. Give them additional choices and ensure you have a customized experience for every person who visits your site. Not doing so could send potential customers to another business.
- Create great customer experience – Adapting to your global customers is essential. Translation lets you increase brand awareness, serve targeting markets in appropriate ways, and support your services with great content. Your customers deserve that and you need to be prepared to offer it to them. Translation is a great place to start.
Options to Translate Text
So, how should you translate your text? Instead of relying on faulty programs such as Google Translate, invest in a quality official translation through a trained agency.
By hiring a professional agency, you may need to pay a higher cost upfront, but this will likely be a service you need only one time, or extremely rarely, and will provide returns for you as you expand and grow your business into new and diverse markets.
Free and inexpensive programs may be available but they aren’t the best in terms of quality. Sure, you save money, but you might end up spending more time on the process. If you throw up the basic translation, it may be far from perfect. This could lead to the need to bring in an agency later after your international reputation has taken a hit.
Reduce Translation Service Costs
There are a couple of ways that you can reduce the costs of translation services.
First, you can have your site translated into only one or two major languages that you believe would be of importance to your customers, or languages of demographics that you would like to target.
If you are considering expanding your business and reaching out to customers from Mexico, you could have your site translated into Spanish first. Then, you could even launch Spanish-language marketing campaigns.
Another method of reducing your translation costs is to translate smaller amounts of text into a larger number of languages in order to reach a broader audience as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Instead of paying more to have your entire site translated, you could choose to only have the information you believe would be most important to your new customers, and then you can more easily afford to translate it into numerous languages.
The upside of this method is that you get to reach more markets at once; the downside is that those new customers may not benefit from the complete scope of your website. Whichever method you choose, enabling more customers to use and understand your site is always a plus for business.
Final Thoughts
POP provides English-to-Spanish and English-to-French translation services and we have experience building multi-language websites. Click here to see Isabella and Friends, a website in six different languages with plans for adding more in the near future. Reach out to us to see more examples of the translation work we’ve done on websites for businesses like your own.
