Why Website Translation Is More Complex Than Ever

Introduction

Today’s websites are far more complex than the static HTML pages of yore. That means localizing those sites for global customers can be really hard—if not impossible—for most in-house teams and translation vendors.

Embedded applications, personalization scripts and dynamic content make the process of detecting translatable website content much more intricate, which often becomes a heavy burden for in-house technical and marketing teams. Vendors choke on this complex tech, too.

As your websites evolve into more complex mechanisms for acquiring and retaining customers, you need a translation approach that’s as sophisticated as the content you’re serving up online—while completely effortless to use.

Website Translation: That Was Then, This Is Now

Back in the early days of the web, most websites were coded simply in HTML, with text-based content. That content was straightforward to detect, translate and publish. Marketing and technology teams could rely on simple technologies—like CMS connectors—to access that online content, export it, translate it, and reintegrate it into global site instances.

But yesterday’s approach to website translation just doesn’t work with today’s cutting-edge online technologies. These days, websites deliver personalized experiences for every user. But this level of individualization creates major complexities and confusion for traditional translation approaches.

The manual process of identifying translatable content and tagging it is cumbersome enough on a few pages of content, but it’s nearly impossible to do at the scale of a modern website.

For example, content populated through applications—like a product information system or a shopping cart platform—isn’t detectable through typical content discovery and translation methods. It requires multiple exports, copying and re-integrating content, and ensuring that the resulting translations don’t disrupt the existing site design or functionality.

Multiply this process by hundreds if not thousands of possible pages for a personalized site experience, and you’re far beyond the capacity and capability of even traditional proxy technologies, much less your in-house technology teams.

The solution to this cumbersome problem is taking the best of both worlds—the most advanced proxy translation technologies and deep human expertise in multilingual website management—and reimagining how multilingual sites are created.

The Turn-Key Proxy Approach

If your organization has a substantial and complex online presence, the only true solution for creating and maintaining multilingual sites is the turn-key translation proxy.

This advanced, hybrid approach to website translation can tackle the most complex, most dynamic sites and make both content translation and management of translated content effortless. A few key advantages of a turn-key proxy approach:

• Its smart website-crawling technologies can detect new translatable content in near real-time, and automatically queue it for translation when discovered.
• It can detect and translate content displayed through complicated third-party applications or integrations—like e-commerce platforms, product review modules or customer service functionality … even content served through scripts.
• It can detect translatable multimedia content like images, video files or PDFs.
• It can leverage APIs to queue non-resident content for translation, like information found in PIMs or for virtual marketplaces.

Conclusion

A turn-key proxy solution can radically simplify the complex process of today’s intricate translation needs, keep the costs of translation down, and supply the specialized, expert resources you need to manage even the most advanced websites of today.

Insist on working with a turn-key proxy provider that can handle the complexities of translating and managing your powerful, dynamic site experience. That kind of partnership ensures you can stay focused on the most important thing: growing your global business.