When companies refresh their digital presence with a website redesign, they often integrate new technologies and solutions to dramatically improve the user experience and customer engagement. Website translation perfectly complements this goal.
Translating website and omnichannel content drives business in new markets in meaningful ways. With the right translation and technology approach, combining your redesign and digital-content translation projects can easily—and with some vendors, nearly effortlessly—extend your world-class customer experience to global buyers.
As you pursue your translation-redesign project, keep these tips in mind to ensure your redesigned site delivers an effective, resonant experience for international customers.
Brand and UX Consistency
Global customers notice when a company offers different online user experiences in different markets—and they usually they don’t like the lack of parity. Studies reveal this is because customers fear that their markets are getting short shrift, compared to larger or more influential markets.
This makes it critically important to provide an equally engaging experience for customers in every market.
To accomplish this, engage world-class linguists to translate your digital content. Provide your brand’s style guide for reference. This helps translators understand your brand’s voice, which they’ll consistently incorporate into translated content.
Multimedia and interactive elements also play key roles in an online CX, but they’re often left untranslated by most translation vendors. This results in a “mixed language” experience that turns off customers. Be sure to find a solution that can effortlessly identify and translate images, videos, website applications and content from third-party solutions.
Don’t ignore the strategic importance that omnichannel content plays in the customer experience. Be sure to translate this content, too.
Localization and Customization
International customers expect parity from one market’s website to another’s, but they also expect companies to address their unique worldviews and cultures. This is where customizing a websites’ translated content—using a process called localization—comes in.
Localizations go beyond conventional word-for-word translation by customizing elements of a website to reflect local phrases, celebrations and customs. This often generates greater trust and conversions among local customers, thanks to:
- Market-exclusive landing pages
- Unique promotions and campaigns
- Unique translations that resonate in-market
- And more
These minor content changes go a long way in creating a resonant, relevant customer experience.
Internet Speed
Internet speeds can vary widely in global markets, which becomes a key consideration as you serve international customers with translated sites.
To compensate for poor landline infrastructures, residents in emerging markets use mobile phones as their primary (or only) Internet-connected devices. Make sure your redesigned site has a responsive website design to support these users. Also, reconsider using bandwidth-heavy large graphics and complex web applications. These can impact the performance of a mobile customer experience.
To further mitigate the bandwidth issue, consider local hosting options and the use of content delivery networks, or CDNs. In China, for example, it’s best to use in-country hosting options and CDNs to improve loading times for Chinese customers.
Easy Language Selection
Global visitors may discover your redesigned origin site via organic search, and find themselves searching for relevant content in their preferred languages.
Reduce friction for these users by providing an intuitive way for them to select their language once they’re on your site. Some website translation vendors provide technology that acts like a seamless “welcome mat” for these users.
This technology can detect a user’s geographic location, language preference and more. It greets customers in the language they’re most likely to speak, and effortlessly directs them to a version of the site in their language.
SEO Considerations
All the work you put into your redesign-translation project will go unnoticed if global customers can’t find your website. Apply these international SEO best practices to ensure the discoverability of your site in regional search engines:
- Leverage localized keywords that customers actually use in their searches
- Use webmaster tools provided by search engines to specify which country your website is relevant for
- Submit your localized websites to all appropriate search engines, including regionally popular ones such as Yandex for Russia or Naver for South Korea
Localized On-Site Search
Make sure to localize your redesigned website’s on-site search capabilities, too.
When international customers search the website in their preferred languages, they expect results displayed in the same language. However, search databases often support only the language in which it was originally published. Searches in other languages won’t turn up any results, preventing customers from finding important content on your website.
Overcome this challenge by working with a vendor that provides smart tools and solutions that localize your on-site search functionality. Localized on-site search will improve the customer experience, increase conversions and reduce bounce rates.
Conclusion
You can deliver a world-class online experience by applying these best practices to your website redesign-translation project. They’ll help your company engage more customers and gain more business with a seamless CX that’s available in their languages, and is intuitive and satisfying to use.
Last updated on March 27, 2019
