Ideally, your website should deliver the best-possible user experience for its customers, in the languages they prefer. But website translation has historically been a very expensive, technically complicated, and time-consuming endeavor.
This drives many companies to embrace risky half-measures for translating their online content for global customers. Most present users with webpages that are partially translated, or completely untranslated and still in English. Yet other companies offer translated microsites, hoping global customers will be satisfied with a downsized online experience.
Those are bad options for your business. Partially-translated websites deliver severely compromised user experiences. And they expose companies to risk, such as:
- They thwart brand awareness efforts, and wreck brand credibility—such as posting incorrect (or untranslated) technical specs in a specific market
- They alienate customers by providing little useful information
- They undermine the effectiveness of local marketing and sales teams
- They create potential legal problems, regarding compliance with local laws or industry regulations—such as mistakenly offering materials that are illegal in some markets
In contrast, full website translation—where the entirety of a website is presented in the preferred language of a target market—is the only viable option for companies that want to earn the business and trust of their global customers.
Partially-translated websites deliver severely compromised user experiences. And they expose companies to risk.
The Benefits of Full Website Translation
It’s not just about risk avoidance, though. A full website translation approach delivers benefits that help you smoothly and successfully generate new business in new markets. For starters, fully-translated websites deliver perfect, uninterrupted customer experiences. Other benefits include:
Sales and Marketing Resource: The full catalog of translated web pages, product documentation and multichannel content will serve locally-based sales teams as they promote the brand, and close leads.
Search Engine Optimization: Using local language throughout a multilingual website results in far higher search rankings, since your content matches what local customers are looking for.
Lead-Gen Engine: Just as you’ve optimized the lead-generation funnel on your English-language site, full website translation transforms your multilingual sites in lead-gen tools for global markets.
Reputation Management: A fully translated website illustrates your commitment to that market. Half-measure approaches can make you seem tentative, as if you’re only testing the waters and not serious about doing business there.
Regulatory Compliance: Full site translation also means meeting the compliance and disclosure guidelines that are unique to each market. That’s an important regulatory step when establishing a new beachfront for doing business somewhere.
While there are plenty of solutions that promise to address website translation in various ways, nearly all deliver less-than-comprehensive results.
Why? Deploying and operating multilingual websites requires an unexpected variety of tasks and actors, leading to continuous effort and hidden expense well beyond mere translation. Most companies lack sufficient people, the right technologies, and the specific expertise to efficiently cope with the challenge.
Look for turn-key, multichannel-ready solutions that offer the best technology and translations.
In contrast, the best website translation solutions offer elegant, effort-free ways of delivering full website translation to your global websites. These solutions deliver accurate, resonant translations without any additional effort on your part.
Look for solutions that offer:
- Turn-key deployment and operation: Advanced proxy-based technology, and complementary services, can nearly eliminate effort on your part.
- Excellent content parsing technology: Full website translation requires a technological solution that can identify and translate all on-site content for translation, including text, images, multimedia files, PDFs and multichannel content.
- Great change-detection technology: The best solutions offer robust technologies that automatically finds new content and queues it for speedy translation
- Efficient, with human touch: Blends technology with human translators, ensuring your site’s translations deliver nuanced, industry-accurate, brand-perfect translations.
- Multichannel-ready: Translates content for use across all channels—from PIM to email campaigns, product feeds, offline documents, social and more.
Contact MotionPoint today to find out how we help companies embrace the benefits of full website translation.
Photo credit: anyaivanova/Shutterstock
Last updated on August 14, 2017
