During my career as a freelancer, I have translated quite a few websites and fixed a lot of serious translation problems that were causing loses to different companies. Yes, they were losing both money and clients due to a bad translation. And I’m not saying this just to show off. On the contrary, I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.

I also asked some of my clients why they didn’t consider translating their websites before; some of them told me that it was expensive or that they had an automatic translator plugin installed in their websites. Well, after having analysed the sales that they gain once their website was translated, they realised that in the long run, they had been losing money in both cases.

Let’s see what you can do to stop losing more money!

Analyse your target market.

It’s true. I am not going to lie to you. Translating a website isn’t cheap (or at least it shouldn’t be if you really want to notice improvements in your website). That’s why this investment must make sense for your business.

Google analytics can show you how important languages are for your website. Analyse your current readers and try to look for a potential client segment that could be growing within your readers.

Then you will have to ask yourself the following question:

• What’s my targeted audience?
• What language do they speak? (You’ll have to think about language variations and dialects. For example, if you want to approach a Spanish audience, you must know that there are 4 main spoken languages in Spain. It gets even more difficult with certain languages such as Arabic with so many different dialects depending on the geographical area that you want to target.
• I have decided investing in the translation of my website, but how am I going to make this decision profitable? Craft an action plan with steps that you’re going to follow once your website is translated.

Needs of your audiences.

Obviously, needs and trends of the different audiences that we want to approach may vary. This is going to have an impact, for example, on how our potential clients are going to find us online. SEO and keywords must be different in each version of your website and must be adapted accordingly.

Let’s see a simple example to clarify this. In my case, when offering translation services, I want to approach a Spanish and British audience. Whereas, in the UK, people are going to be more likely to look for a “Spanish translator” or a “Spanish translation”, in Spain it’s going to be the other way around, people will be more likely to find for an “English translation”. This small change in my copy and keyword strategy can have a significant importance in my website.

Pay attention to the site structure.

Design trends may vary from one country to another. If potential clients are familiarised with the structure of your site, it will be easier for them to find the information that they are looking for and optimise your conversions.

Your clients will appreciate that you are communicating in their languages.

If done well, they will appreciate that you’re making an effort to make things easier for them. However, a clumsy translation of your site will only make things even more difficult for them.

Choose the content that they are interested in. As mentioned before, clients in different countries will have different needs and will be interested in different topics. A good strategy to attract new potential clients is to adapt the new content of your website to these needs of your new targeted audience.

Pay special attention to the name of your brand and your products.

I have seen horrific translation when it comes to names of brands and products mostly due to cultural differences between two cultures. You can’t imagine how much money these business have lost, as well as clients of course, and not just that, if you don’t do it right and ended up with a bad translation of your brand name, your brand can have a very bad reputation within a whole new country. And we all know how important word-of-mouth is, right?

If you want to know some of these examples, have a look at this video:

Or this one:

Your website copy is key for your website translation.

I’d need to expand this point in a different blog post. To keep it simple, the best to sell online is through words. Within two different languages, there are different aspects to bear in mind when selling: the tone, the voice of your brand, the use of different structures and verbal tenses, and the list goes on and on.

These are the things that our (not so) friend, Google Translate, can’t do. And that is why it’s so important to invest in a quality translation of we really want to obtain results.

Have you ever invested in your website translation? What benefits did you gain?

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