Introduction

As you’re looking for a translation partner to help take your business into online international markets, you’ll need one that can do more than localize website copy and omnichannel content.

Here are some key best practices to look for as you review vendors. They’ll help you identify an effective, ethical translation partner for the long haul.

1: How easy is it to gather the website content needed to translate and get started?

Many website translation vendors expect your team to compile all of your relevant content—from website text to images, multimedia, single-page applications, JavaScript and more—and deliver it to them for translation. This manual process is complicated, time-consuming, resource-intensive and error-prone.

But vendors that specialize in website and digital-content localization have technically advanced solutions that can accurately determine your project’s scope, and all of its translatable content, without your team’s involvement. They can deploy special content-detection web crawlers that automatically—and precisely—detect your content.

2: What translation options are available for content?

Great vendors offer website localizations crafted by human linguists, or a hybrid of human linguists and automated translation software (aka machine translation), or by machine translation only.

3: What’s the quality of the translations?

In addition to the technologies great vendors use to make website translation effortless for customers, they should also leverage expert account teams that oversee every aspect of your unique website translation project. They should include dedicated resources such as:

• ISO-certified translators and editors who have expertise in your industry
• Project Managers who work to ensure that their team understands your goals and expectations
• Translation Account Managers to ensure website and omnichannel content is translated promptly and accurately
• A Design and Media Team that ensures all localized multimedia assets preserve your brand’s integrity

4: Can the vendor minimize translation costs?

The best website localization vendors don’t hang their business models on translation, but on the value their technology presents to customers. This includes leveraging innovative pattern-recognition capabilities to translate repetitive, dynamically-generated text segments only once (instead of every time the content might appear on-site). This reduces translation costs.

5: How are website updates detected?

Look for a vendor that has technologies that automatically detect and capture all content required for translation. This eliminates any need for you to use a complicated, error-prone process to manually identify and submit this content instead.

Some vendors even offer online “translation portals” that your teams can use 24/7 to easily submit new content for translation.

6: Does the vendor keep translation projects efficient without taxing internal teams?

The right vendor should offer fully turn-key solutions that make translation projects practically hands-free. They’ll also work within your brand’s style guide to ensure their linguists are immersed in your business and can keep your projects on track—and on message—without extra effort from you.

Ideal vendors also offer technology- and CMS-independent solutions that won’t disrupt your site infrastructure at all—and make future site redesigns and platform migrations easy, too.

The most advanced systems can support and translate content coded in any programming language, and even work seamlessly with your site’s third-party content modules, single-page applications and other dynamic features. Some even offer independent, secure hosting for your translated sites if you wish.

7: Is just translating website content enough?

Ask your potential vendors if their technology can identify website visitors’ language preferences and offer them the ability to immediately select their preferred language for the best on-site experience. Top vendors can also translate your site’s multimedia content—including images, video captions, downloadable documents and interactive applications.

The best partners can also:

• Leverage international SEO best practices
• Localize your site’s sitemap to improve search engine discoverability
• Translate the entire customer experience, including offline and digital omnichannel content

8: What kind of support is provided?

Your translation partner should be able to support you at any time of the day, and you should have multiple options for contacting them to initiate or escalate support requests.

The best vendors have dedicated support portals, email addresses and phone numbers for customers and provide support for the entire translation project—not just the translation itself.

9: Can they easily scale to engage additional markets?

Ask potential partners to share how easy or complex it will be to expand your translated site to new languages and markets. The best ones make it fast, and even have technology capabilities that can leverage any translated content for new global markets that share a language with the markets you’d be serving with your localized site. This can save 40% or more on translation costs.

Conclusion

Website translation doesn’t have to be a complex project that taxes and frustrates your team. Armed with the right questions, you can look for a true partner that has the expertise, technology and solution design that will make your website translation project fast, effortless and ultimately a global business success.