Common Mistakes When Translating a Website

Website translation is about so much more than just language – SEO, cultural nuances, design, and localization all play a role.

Your website serves as a virtual shop window and is often the first port of call for new or returning customers.

A good website should be engaging, informative, SEO-friendly, clear, and easily navigable. All this can be tricky enough when designing a site in your own native language, but translating to another language can throw up a lot more potential pitfalls.

Here are four common mistakes to look out for:

Using Automatic Translation

There are many online and automatic translation services available. These can offer a cheap or free translation that is quick and easy to use, but they can also lead to unprofessional, stilted, or jerky-looking content and sometimes outright mistakes. Working with professional, native speaking translators can help to avoid errors and make your content flow naturally.

This doesn’t mean that a good translation company won’t make the best use of technology. A translation memory is a database that can be used to store sections of text that have been previously translated, making the process quicker and easier, and ensuring a level of consistency across your website and other resources (such as your social media profiles and localized marketing materials).

Failing to Localize Properly

There’s more to reaching out to new markets than simple translation. You also need to adapt your website to match the preferences and sensibilities of your audience. The use of appropriate images is one area that requires careful consideration.

Pictures of scantily clad holidaymakers, for example, may be fine in some markets but may be considered inappropriate or offensive in other more conservative cultures. The “thumbs up” sign, meanwhile, stands for “OK” or “good” in many cultures but is an obscene gesture in much of the Middle East, parts of West Africa, and parts of South America.

Native translators can help you avoid translation errors and cultural faux pas and they can also allow you to add cultural references to give your content a more local feel. Don’t forget that you should also localize important data such as currencies and prices, shipping information, time zones, and date formats.

Text Expansion and Contraction

Don’t assume that translated content will fit neatly into every design parameter of your website. Different languages can take more or less space on the page to express the same ideas and information.

In some cases you may be able to reduce font sizes to fit more information into limited spaces but any text should still be clear and easy to read, preferably in easily digestible blocks. Any translators you work with will need to know the space limitations they are working with and may need to change or adapt the content to fit.

This is another good reason to rely on experienced, professional translators rather than machine translation. Larger passages of text can usually be adapted more easily than shorter ones such as menu items that have very limited and clearly defined limits. IBM suggests that between 100 percent to 200 percent of extra physical space may be required when translating a source text of up to 10 characters within a user interface. This falls to an additional 30 percent of space for text of 70 characters or more.

Conversely, if translated content takes up less space, you don’t want too much blank space and have to play around with the visual design. The use of cascading style sheets (CSS) can be ideal for this, as it allows you to keep your document content separate from the layout and design.

Directly Translating Keywords

Keywords are particularly important for search engine optimization (SEO) and direct translations of your English language keywords will not necessarily yield the best results.

Abbreviations, acronyms, slang, and other alternative terms are all frequently used. A direct Italian translation of “low-cost flights” for example could be “voli a basso prezzo,” which performs relatively poorly. The Anglo-Italian hybrid “voli low cost” actually yields far better results, which is something you’d be unlikely to guess without a little local knowledge.

Don’t throw out all your carefully researched English keywords, but use them as a jumping-off point rather than a fixed list. Brainstorm alternatives with the help of a native speaker and test each one for local searches before implementation.

Conclusion

It can be tempting to think that a single English language website can reach potential customers wherever they are in the world. Technically it could, but a Eurobarometer survey found that 45 percent of online users across the European Union only visited websites in their own languages, while a global survey by Common Sense Advisory found that 75 percent of consumers preferred to buy products in their native language.

Localization can be an effective way to reach out to new markets and win new customers and clients. It must be done effectivel,y though, or it could leave your operation looking amateurish and could even do more harm than good. It’s all about speaking your customer’s language and professional translation companies can help you do just that.

Image via Shutterstock.

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