Pitfalls Await Marketers Who Take Website Translation In-House

Introduction

Customers living in international markets want world-class user experiences, presented in the languages they speak. But localizing your website with in-house staff is painful, complicated, and often very costly:

• Deploying and operating multilingual websites requires continuous effort and costs that go beyond translation
• Multilingual features of most CMSs can’t handle the ongoing effort needed to keep a translated site up-to-date
• Digital-first translation vendors are built to eliminate burdens and unexpected costs of website translation

Process-Filled Pain Points

Deploying and operating multilingual websites demands a lot of people, performing lots of tasks. This leads to continuous effort and unexpected costs that go well beyond mere translation. Marketing teams rarely have the staff, technologies or expertise to efficiently cope with the challenge.

Here are some of the responsibilities you’d shoulder if you opt to do the work in-house:

• Thoroughly identifying and compiling all on-site content for translation (including text, images, multimedia, PDFs and more), before the multilingual site is translated
• Acquiring the resources required to develop and manage translation workflows, quality assurance and project management
• Overseeing the transmission of translatable content to in-house translation teams or offsite vendors
• Owning the process of getting that material translated quickly and accurately
• Owning the process of vetting the translated content for accuracy, authenticity and brand consistency
• Integrating the translated content into the proper international “instance” of your multilingual CMS, to serve the right global market
• Assuring the translated content fits seamlessly within established page templates, and doesn’t “break” page designs due to word growth and other translation-related issues
• Managing the exponential growth of personnel and resources when adding even more languages to serve new markets
• Following this complex and costly process again and again, every time you add or change content to your website.

Limited Resources for Seemingly Unlimited Tasks

You won’t just need to follow the processes in the previous section again and again—you must ensure you have the resources on a consistent basis to deliver on these workflows.

Will your linguists be ready when you need them? What about your IT team? Any gap in the process, including the availability of personnel on any given day, will delay the daily upkeep of your multilingual site.

This becomes a business liability because you keep leaning on people to perform tasks they weren’t hired to do. That’s no way to run a project.

Outsourcing the localization process to a translation agency might appear to be a viable solution; after all, it seems the task of translation requires the most time and effort. This is not the case. Linguistics is in fact a minute part of what website translation is all about.

It’s the processes and workflows that make the biggest impact. Whoever owns the translation process—be it your in-house team or an agency—the major problems remain. Managing this project is bigger than you think, and is not a core competency for your team.

Get this into the hands of a digital-first agency that specializes in website translation.

Look for Effortless Solutions

With so much at stake, look for a digital-first website translation solution built to handle the demands of content detection, translation, integration and coding in a timely and coordinated way. As you evaluate your options, consider your pain points—and look for answers to these questions:

• Is the solution built with the purpose of minimizing the operational complexity and cost you’d face with an in-house approach?
• Is it effortless and turn-key at launch and ongoing, with all personnel, processes and technology provided by the vendor?
• Can it handle the translation, deployment, and operation of multilingual websites while optimizing the customer experience across all channels?
• Is it designed to handle all the under-the-hood complexities that’d otherwise make the project a burden for you and your IT team?
• Can it identify, translate, proofread and publish new content in about one business day?
• Can it work with any CMS, website or programming language?
• Can its translation capabilities extend to emails, product feeds, offline documents, social media and other multichannel content?

The success of your company’s global expansion depends on technologies and processes that eliminate in-house burdens, not increase them. Make sure the website translation vendor you choose has the tech and expertise to help you serve international markets—the right way.