Home » How to Localize Your Website: Translation Tips for International Business Expansion

How to Localize Your Website: Translation Tips for International Business Expansion

Websites are powerful tools for connecting with and interacting with your audience. It is a platform for promoting various goods, services, and concepts. However, as companies expand internationally, many customers are looking for websites that allow them to communicate with the brands in their language. Localizing your website is a wise move to increase traffic, growth, and profitability while extending your consumer base.

According to research, 70% of internet users are non-native English speakers. Furthermore, if a website is not available in their local tongue, 40% of consumers will not purchase it. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that businesses are updating their websites to the customs and languages of their target market.

What Is The Localization Of Websites?

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Website localization is the process of adjusting your current website’s appearance, content, and operation to the culture and language of your audience. Generally, it refers to making the website user-friendly, accessible, and appropriate for the local culture. Translation and localization frequently need clarification. A proper website localization, however, requires much more. Professional translation services handle cultural and non-textual issues and translate the text correctly.

Guidelines For Successful Website Localization

Now comes the challenging part. Localizing your website might be difficult because of the many different languages and purchasing habits. Let’s start with some advice to make localizing your website quick and easy.

Select Who You Want To Target

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Choosing the regions and languages you wish to localize would be best. Study your buyer profile, cultural difficulties, rivals, regional laws, vocabularies, idioms, etc.

Do Accurate Translations

It is essential to have expert, high-caliber caliber human translations. Usually, Google Translate is insufficient. Content that needs to be better translated can help your company. As a first step, Google Translate is helpful, but hiring a professional translator for your content is essential. Verify that the translations are accurate. Visit the Translation Party to discover why computer translation cannot be trusted. A sentence is taken, translated into several languages, and then returned to the original language. It’s an unexpected outcome.

Make Use Of Reputable Online Translation Providers

The idea is to have expert, high-caliber human translations. However, obtaining them should be easy, convenient, and effective. It needs to be as simple as clicking a button. Making ordering expert translations as simple as feasible was a primary aim for Localize. Professional translation is now flexible and inexpensive because of the many high-quality website translation services.

Simplify Content Management

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It’s fantastic to have your website translated. However, it might be challenging to guarantee that updates to your content are consistently reflected in the translated version of your website. It is a constant process to localize. Everyone developed Localize, among other things, for this reason.

Automation should be used for content management, identification, and awareness. It has made it easy to turn localization from a one-time task into a continuous process. Writing quality content and text is challenging enough; the last thing you need is for your team to keep track of which elements, links, and contents have changed each time a new version of your product is released.

Make Language Choices Simple

If someone is unfamiliar with your website, they should only have to search for a short time to determine whether a translated version exists. Make it simple for them to discover the languages you accept. Finding the translated website is simple, and the translations are excellent. It increases consumer satisfaction and increases traffic.

Keyword Analysis

It is a good idea to conduct keyword research for your localized website as soon as you have chosen your target markets and before you begin the actual localization job. The terms people in your target market use to look for similar goods and services—and how those terms differ from those used by people in your home market—will become clearer.

You can guarantee that your material appears to be appropriate searches by researching the ideal keywords and keyphrases to utilize on your localized website. This and other multilingual SEO (search engine optimization) strategies will increase your visibility and rank, resulting in increased traffic and long-term cost savings (since you won’t need to buy ads to reach your target audience).

The most important thing to remember while conducting keyword research is to avoid just translating your local market’s terms. It would be best if you learned how your items or services are genuinely discussed by the target market. Even the best content will fall flat if the target audience cannot initially locate it.

Multilingual keyword research comes into play in this situation. This research can be done for you by marketers who are fluent in your target language, or you can hire a group of translators with SEO experience to assist you. Whoever handles it should be able to find the best local terms to draw in more visitors and produce more leads if they have the correct mix of industry knowledge, SEO expertise, purpose-built tools, and language abilities.

Test Out Your Website

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After localizing your website, it’s crucial to test it extensively to ensure that all words are translated accurately, the user interface (UI) appears and functions as it should, and there are no technical problems. Testing for localization involves examining both verbal and technical accuracy.

Testing for localized websites that are functional points out

  • Encryption techniques
  • Equipment compatibility
  • Identifiers, dates, times, weights, and other data.
  • Upgrades entry forms
  • Hyperlinks
  • Image suitability
  • Invalid strings and form functionality
  • Grocery cart
  • Transaction processing
  • Loading period
  • Downloads

Testing multilingual website localization addresses:

  • Problems in grammar and punctuation
  • Typographical mistakes
  • Cultural sensitivity
  • Using the wrong terms
  • Message attractiveness and readability
  • Foreign-language strings

The testing method should involve a native speaker with extensive professional experience and knowledge of localization for the target market. Then you may create a test strategy, compile all the necessary testing resources, set up the testing environment, and begin.

Conclusion

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Suppose you’ve taken the time to consider how your target market differs from your home market. In that case, localizing your material, obtaining local reviews and testimonials, leveraging local communities, and collaborating with local influencers are all excellent places to start. You’ll be well on your way to international success by referring to the provided advice on localizing a website and keeping your target market in mind.

Jaime Hay