As a matter of fact, if your website is monolingual, you are missing on a lot of potential readers, customers or buyers, which consequently might lead you to losing a lot of profit.

For example, although English is the second most spoken language in the world (20% of the world’s population speaks English, with 400 million native speakers and 1,5 billion fluent speakers) 59% of the websites online are available in English, which shows a huge lack in the other languages.

What to do then?

As a business owner, you are not expected to know all the languages, and you absolutely need help with the proper marketing team, accountants, and also accredited translators to help you reach a bigger and very specific traffic to your website depending on your needs.

Understand your translation needs:

Talking about ‘needs’, it is crucial before choosing a translation service to study it’s use and compatibility with your vision, values, and objectives.

Whether you are a business wanting to go international, an institution that want to provide access to global audiences, or an individual dealing with multicultural environments that require communication across boundaries of language. Nonetheless, you must first analyze your exact needs for translation to assist you in navigating critical points to make a decision on what to translate and when.

The first step in assessing your translation needs is to clearly define your purpose; Ask yourself why you need translation services? Is it because your product/ service would sell better worldwide? Is it because your message would be transmitted better in other languages? or is it because you want to grow your profit by reaching a bigger audience?

Ask yourself as much questions as you can, in order to understand your target audience and your objectives which is crucial to choose your translation service. For example, if you have a blog about traveling you better have it in the most spoken languages in the world: Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese.

Don’t forget the importance of establishing your budget, this step is essential to ensure that your translation needs align with your financial resources and keep your objectives realizable financially wise.

Common errors when choosing the right translation service:

  1. Relying Solely on Machine Translation without any human review: Although machine translation (MT) has made some incredible advances with natural language processing (NLP), and in today’s world, everyone is using the ‘translate to …’ prompt on chat GPT, yet it’s still not completely accurate.
    If you are using Chat GPT, Google Translate, or any similar tool, keep in mind that the visitors will be mainly native speakers, and they will notice the grammatical mistakes, errors are inevitable, but this will affect your credibility, especially in the world full of scammers we live in.
  2. Neglecting cultural and linguistic nuance of the target audience: Each language has a unique structure based on people’s way of thinking, lifestyle, shared history, and geographical conditions. Cultural differences can lead to words and expressions having different meanings. It is not possible to interpret and translate language independently of its context. Neglecting these different meanings and usages during translation, misinterpreting, or overlooking cultural details can lead to translation errors. Another challenging aspect of translation is Idiomatic expression. Idiomatic expressions, colloquialisms, and slang can be difficult to translate because they may have a different equivalent in the target language. This can be avoided when the translator researches and understands the cultural context of the expression and finds an appropriate equivalent in the target language.
  3. Failing to Proofread the translated content: Proofreading is the process of checking for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, syntax, punctuation errors, etc. If proofreading a localized website is left solely to machines, the same errors can keep coming up time and time again because computers are incapable of understanding context and nuance. On the other hand, a human reader might notice that the context is not right and make corrections.

6 essential services to consider:

  1. Localization: Localization is defined as adapting a product, service, or offering to meet the needs of those from a particular market or locale. Website localization is essentially the process of adapting your original website through language, design, and cultural elements to provide a relevant user experience for your new target audience.
  2. CMS Compatibility: The best CMS should allow you to easily add more languages as and when required. It should do so without causing any hiccups in performance or slowing down your site speeds. It should also allow you to maintain multiple locales without requiring any additional work from your end once they are added initially. A good CMS solution should also allow you the flexibility to present multilingual content in interesting and unique ways. It also produces simple, clean, and valid code that makes your website search engine-friendly.
  3. SEO Optimization: Multilingual SEO Localization is an integral part of your website localization process, start by selecting the most relevant keywords for your target language, ensuring they resonate with local users. Next, prioritize website speed, as customers are more likely to abandon slow-loading sites, negatively impacting your rankings. Don’t forget to translate metadata, including titles and descriptions, to improve your site’s visibility in regional search results. Additionally, consider using country-coded top-level domains (ccTLDs) to signal your site’s relevance to specific markets. Finally, implement hreflang tags to help search engines like Google understand your site’s language and intended region, further enhancing your international SEO efforts.
  4. Mobile Optimization: Keep in mind that nowadays, 95,8% of internet users are on their phones, which explains the importance of Mobile optimization for a great user experience. it improves user satisfaction and increases user engagement and retention, and by retention we mean the user will stay in your website for longer periods which is more likely to lead them to buy your service/product.
  5. Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Each country has its own specific legislation to avoid legal complications, you need to have a full understanding of the legal requirements and laws of each country. It is better to hire an experienced agency to make sure your website is following the laws.
  6. Accessibility: Creating a globally accessible website with localized content helps create barrier-free access for visitors in multiple languages. Localizing a website enables target readers and audiences to engage with content in specific languages. This includes website visitors with disabilities using assistive technology. Comprehensive website localization means updating both visible and hidden content, (not directly visible on screen), like image alt text.

Quality Assurance and Pricing

Before setting your prices, conduct a thorough market analysis. Look at what your competitors are charging for similar QA services. Consider the complexity of the services offered, the reputation of your competitors, and the specific needs of your target market. This will give you a baseline for your pricing and help you position your services in a way that reflects the value you offer.

How Ulatus can help

As a professional translation company, we specialize in offering industry-specific solutions tailored to meet your unique needs. Our expert linguists have the skills and experience to translate a variety of document types, ensuring that your translations are accurate and culturally appropriate.