While money makes the world go around and helps businesses survive and thrive, not everything revolves around money when managing a business. Several other factors have become important during the last years as more activities are done online. Multiculturalism, the worldwide use of online platforms for marketing and sale, combined with the large numbers of non-English speakers online, have undeniably changed the way we do business today.
As English is widely understood around the world, most customers searching the global market are able to find the product, or service, they are looking for even when it’s not in their own language. However, as more and more web owners recognize customer traffic coming from various countries around the world they also start to evaluate the benefits of translating their website to the native language of their customers. Moving from one language to a multi language website or business, can however be complicated. As a result, digital marketing agencies and SEO agencies have seen an increase of requests for international marketing and SEO.
One website that recently decided to offer their services in multiple languages is the Gamblersbet.com. It’s an english site with base in the US. They give their readers advice on issues related to playing at casinos that fully operate online. We asked their content manager Dave Brown to shed some light on the topic to those that are in the process of considering translating their website to other languages.
This is what he had to say;
Our Experience At The Gamblersbet.com
Despite all of the challenges, it was important for us to listen to our readers. From being an English only website we now have the site also in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai and Japanese.
During the last year we received more and more emails from visitors of these languages, asking us to clarify something,or to give them region specific advice on different issues. We understood it would be smart to provide them with the translated content they are looking for and make sure to address the specific issues they were facing. By making their native language optional, our non-english readers feel more welcome, comfortable in understanding the information and relaxed when using your services. We did not only want to offer a translated copy of our content but decided to give complete service to our non-english visitors. To do this we decided to employ native speaking project managers for each of the languages we added and these project managers worked closely with professional translators. For a gambler coming to our site for advice, perhaps to get information on how to wager on a game of poker using his domestic currency, making the switch from Euros or American Dollars to the Japanese Yen can be tedious or difficult.
To translate a website into several languages is not easy. It’s not enough that the site gets traffic from other countries, as a business owner you must consider the value of translating the site, and later maintaining it. Using professional services can be expensive. If you sell products the issue becomes a lot more complicated as you must consider logistical factors as well. Most website owners can start by translating the home page or certain pages like T/C, pricing or shipping information but the bottom line is that some of your website’s foreign visitors will move on to a platform that fully caters to their exact needs. If this is a large potential market for your business then don’t risk losing your prospects because you failed to have your website professionally translated.
The Many Challenges Of Translating a Website
It’s perhaps easy to imagine you will need help from a web-developer to make sure the new languages are implemented correctly but there are many other issues. Some of these may seem small compared to the technical implementation but failing to address them before the process may cause the whole project to fail before it goes live. One example is to carefully consider what language and/or market you want to target. Should you translate for a specific language, like Spanish, or for a region, like Latin America? Spanish is spoken in both Spain, the US and parts of South America. However, keep in main that people in Spain speak a slightly different Spanish than Latin Americans. For example, someone from Spain will instantly figure out the content on your site has not been written and edited by someone from Spain. Another example is Mexico. If you make the mistake of thinking all Mexicans speak Spanish you may lose a significant part of your prospects online. Yucatec Maya, Mixtec or Nahuatl are just a few of the most used dialects in Mexico. Similar differences lie between Portuguese and Brazilian site visitors and users.And Spanish is not Portuguese.
Never ignore the cultural differences between various countries that apparently use the same language or you might lose your professionalism in the eyes of buyers.
Once this is sorted out, it’s time to decide how you want to do the translations. By using an automated translation tool, or manually have translators do the job. Your first thoughts may be to use a translation widget but after reading this article you may want to think again. We are not completely against them, it may work but the truth is that translation widgets are known to be rather unreliable. Think in terms of improper grammar and incorrect translations that will, without a doubt, make website visitors doubt the seriousness and legitimacy of your business.
It’s very easy to “get lost in translation” if you don’t speak the language yourself. It may seem as a good idea to use a translator tool, and this may work very well for certain types of content but it really depends on the language and the industry of your business. As the Gamblersbet.com is within the online gaming industry with very unique terminology we soon realize that automated translations resulted in very funny, often embarrassing translations. For us it was an easy choice to recruit native speaking translators that could also localize the content and make sure we used the correct terminology for each language.
You really need to think this through early on in the process and make sure you know what language and/or region to target.
The consequences of “getting lost in translation” can, at the best be funny, but it may end up hurting your brand, something you want to avoid at any cost. If you have no idea how “sensitive” your new market is to translation errors, you should definitely consider hiring native speaking project managers and/or use a professional translation service that will solve your problem – and save your business.
Despite the challenges, my advice is to avoid getting lost in translation and reach new markets by addressing all of their language needs with professionalism and care. I hope this article has helped you see a few of the most important factors and challenges to consider before embarking on the journey to become multi-language!
Once your site is up and live you can start to implement some strategies that will help you attract even more international visitors to your website!
