In the world of website translation, most vendors use solutions that localize content in a vacuum. This practice often relies on low-tech solutions that make it practically impossible for linguists to accurately capture the spirit of the source material they’re tasked to translate.
The underwhelming translations that result from this approach become a vexing challenge for companies seeking to expand into multilingual or international markets. It’s especially problematic for brands that lean heavily into interdependent, complex collections of information—such as those found in healthcare, insurance or highly technical industries.
Most translation agencies use CMS connectors to collect a website’s content. This content is often bundled into spreadsheet files, which linguists then translate. This process is regularly used to translate a website, and it delivers a functional use of language and vocabulary to get the literal meaning of the text across.
But this approach, and others, cannot deliver something critical for linguists that takes ho-hum website translations to world-class: on-page context. This can make all the difference for your multilingual site.
The Challenges with Non-Contextual Translation
Most website content is translated with zero insight into how it will be displayed alongside other content or graphical elements on a webpage. Since translation is often occurring in offline spreadsheet files, or in cloud-based files that are still far removed from the text’s original online presentation, it’s practically happening in isolation.
When this translated text is integrated back onto the multilingual site, it can easily read clumsily, or be disconnected from other critical elements on the page—such as previously translated text, graphics or product information. Moreover, if the new content has more text characters than the original content, your meticulously crafted website design and layout may “break,” creating disruptive and UX-wrecking misalignments or other issues.
As a result, you lose important brand continuity, voice or even technical accuracy. That’s a big risk, especially for a brand that’s trying to expand its footprint in new markets.
But thankfully, there’s a better way.
The MotionPoint Difference
Because MotionPoint does website translation differently, our expert teams translate website content with the proper context to ensure accuracy, quality and brand consistency.
The difference is two-fold:
Proprietary In-Context Technology
MotionPoint’s human translators use a proprietary tool we’ve developed to display a live view of your website as they translate its content. This way, when a translator is working with copy or a piece of multimedia content, they can see if it integrates effortlessly with the surrounding content on the page.
They’ll also be able to see in real-time if any translations might compromise a webpage’s design, and make on-the-fly adjustments to preserve the user experience.
Working this way ensures accurate translations that play nicely with your site’s design templates. And it empowers translators to make subtle-but-critical decisions about word choice, brand voice and phrasing. This helps guarantee that translated content resonates with the intended audience.
Streamlined Workflows
Our advanced translation workflows are stewarded entirely by our translation teams, saving your team the time and effort it takes to manage the translation process. This efficiently and dramatically reduces the complexity of website translation projects for your business.
Once our teams gather and validate your translatable content, an expert linguist will view it live in our in-context tool as they perform the translations. That gives them a full view into the appearance, context and placement of the translated content so they can make any adjustments. Our editorial and QA teams also check the content in context before it’s pushed live to your site.
And the bonus? The entire translation process typically happens within one business day. It can be accelerated to meet your needs, if required.
Conclusion
Today’s powerful, complex websites rely on a sophisticated network of content that ensures customers can find what they need, get accurate information and glean an accurate, distinct sense of your brand and offerings.
It’s not enough to simply translate content without also being able to see how and where it will appear on a new multilingual site, or how it will read when it’s embedded in a page. Context is everything, and you need to know that the content you translate will integrate seamlessly with the other elements across the page and the rest of the site.
MotionPoint’s advanced translation approach uses in-context translation tools to view your content live as it’s translated, and our expert teams can ensure translation quality, relevance and accuracy. This modern approach to website translation preserves important elements of your brand voice and user experience with no effort required from you, enabling you to focus on your company’s long-term success in international markets.
Last updated on November 11, 2020
