Website Translation – How important is it to you?

Community
1

Here on the SPF forums we frequently get questions about website translation. Often these are about the technical side of things: ‘how do I make a multi-lingual site’.

The ‘how’, though, is only one side of the matter. There’s also the ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘who’.

Me, I’ve only built one multi-lingual website so far. All the others are in one language only (English, Italian or Dutch), depending on the target of the website.

My personal blog (primarily meant for my friends and relatives in Holland) is in Dutch. A website I made for an association here in Italy is in Italian. Since they are targeting a specific country, I don’t think it would be worth the time and energy needed to make these websites accessible in any other languages. Not even English.
I have a site in English as well. I want it to be understandable by the greatest number of people possible, with the minimum effort (I don’t make any money off it), so English was the natural choice for me.

I developed a couple of ecommerce sites that are only in Dutch. Of course, this limits the potential market, and therefore the potential sales. However, the owners want to sell only in the Netherlands, so there was no need for them to have the possibility to add another language.

The one multi-lingual site I made is another ecommerce site. It started out as a Dutch-only site, but the shop owner soon started to get emails from other countries asking for information. Potential clients, but most of them never ordered anything. I made the site multi-lingual, and the owner added the 4 languages that seemed most promising from a commercial point of view (English, French, German, and Spanish). Orders have more than doubled.

If I happen to visit a website that interests me, and that’s written in a language I don’t understand, sometimes (if I really want to know what it says) I use a web translation service (like Google). Usually it does the trick, but to be honest the results are very poor. And I for sure wouldn’t buy anything from a website I can’t read. In my opinion, if you really need your site to be multi-lingual, website translation services are no alternative for a “native” (I’m sure this isn’t the correct term, but I hope it is clear) multi-lingual site.

Let’s hear your thoughts on this subject. I’ll give you a couple of questions to answer to start the discussion, but don’t feel limited by them, all ideas and experiences are welcome.

  1. How accessible should your website be in terms of language support?
  2. How many language options should you offer to your visitors other than English (or your native language)?
  3. Do you think it’s important to offer the option of translating your website to any given language?
  4. Do you think using website translation services are a good alternative to having a “native” multi-lingual site?
  5. Does having your website available in numerous languages really increase your potential sales/exposure to the World Wide Web?
  6. Does it eliminate competition in the same field?
  7. When is enough really enough in terms of the amount of languages you should support?
2

It depends upon the nature of the website and its target audience at to how many languages you offer like was mentioned. I am not as lucky as you with being multilingual; so it would be pointless me offering services in Dutch, as I couldn’t interpret, which MARKUP to use where, for the actual website content.

I think the problem with offering ‘automated translation services’ is ‘rather dubious’ like you said - because you can get some really weird results. For example some people may say I am; “A reet clogger” but it wouldn’t probably translate into the correct term (hard man), whichever translation tool you used. :lol:

Making use of Internationalisation surely would increase your potential sales exposure to the World Wide Web, well at least your exposure/interoperability. I don’t know about actual sales figures though?

I don’t think you can ever eliminate competition but it might give you a positive advantage if you can provide content in various languages.

Well, HTML syntax is written in English so generally that’s considered the language of the web.

3

Making a website available in multiple languages basically means creating different versions of the website in different languages. The translation should ideally be made by a professional translator because even if you know a language doesn’t mean you know how to translate it. Especially if there’s niche specific terminology.

Auto translators are definitely out of the question. I’ve seen sites that provide links to auto translated versions of their site but it’s rubbish. Most of them do that for search engines and hardly care about visitors (as evident by ads all over the place).

Whether you should translate the site depends if there’s demand for that. The example of the ecommerce store is a great one. The owner knew there were prospects so it only made sense to give them what they wanted.

It makes a lot of sense for ecommerce stores that ship worldwide, especially if the default language is not English. But having your local language and English already covers a lot of ground.

One caveat is that when people see the website in a certain language, they will expect support in that language too. So you need to make sure you can support them.

I would do a good market research before adding a language and only do it if there’s great demand. The costs of adding a language is not just for the translation but for additional support too.

As far as competition, “eliminate” is a bold word. You’ll never eliminate competition in a free market. But you can certainly take your share of the market by giving people what they want.

I doubt it makes sense to translate personal/hobby type of sites, though, or indeed, any site that has a strong community involvement. It basically means different communities and you might as well do it on completely different sites to avoid confusion amongst other things. I can’t imagine SitePoint having English and, say, Spanish versions. They’d have to launch SitioPunto or whatever :slight_smile:

4

Like you say, the point I was trying to make is that what language(s) to use for a website depend on it’s nature and the target audience. It would indeed be hard to create a site in a language you don’t understand.

I think the problem with offering ‘automated translation services’ is ‘rather dubious’ like you said - because you can get some really weird results. For example some people may say I am; “A reet clogger” but it wouldn’t probably translate into the correct term (hard man), whichever translation tool you used. :lol:

:lol:
Never heard that one before.

Making use of Internationalisation surely would increase your potential sales exposure to the World Wide Web, well at least your exposure/interoperability. I don’t know about actual sales figures though?

I don’t think you can ever eliminate competition but it might give you a positive advantage if you can provide content in various languages.

I don’t think you can eliminate competition either. If you’re a small site, it could give you access to other countries, but of course you’d have to compete against other sites that offer the same services/products in that language. For big sites (ebay, amazon) I think it’s different. They have the name, the size (and the money to do it the right way), and if they offer their services in another language I’d say they could maybe not “eliminate” the local competition, but give them a hard time for sure.
And in Italy, I’m sure the majority of people would never use ebay or amazon if they didn’t have an italian version.

Well, HTML syntax is written in English so generally that’s considered the language of the web.

I don’t know if customers really care about HTML?

True. A website full of errors doesn’t make a good impression. Especially if it’s a site where you’d want to buy something.

Auto translators are definitely out of the question. I’ve seen sites that provide links to auto translated versions of their site but it’s rubbish. Most of them do that for search engines and hardly care about visitors (as evident by ads all over the place).

Agreed.

Whether you should translate the site depends if there’s demand for that. The example of the ecommerce store is a great one. The owner knew there were prospects so it only made sense to give them what they wanted.

It makes a lot of sense for ecommerce stores that ship worldwide, especially if the default language is not English. But having your local language and English already covers a lot of ground.

True.

One caveat is that when people see the website in a certain language, they will expect support in that language too. So you need to make sure you can support them.

I would do a good market research before adding a language and only do it if there’s great demand. The costs of adding a language is not just for the translation but for additional support too.

That’s true. The owner of the site I mentioned arranged for support in those languages.

As far as competition, “eliminate” is a bold word. You’ll never eliminate competition in a free market. But you can certainly take your share of the market by giving people what they want.

Agreed (see above).

I doubt it makes sense to translate personal/hobby type of sites, though, or indeed, any site that has a strong community involvement. It basically means different communities and you might as well do it on completely different sites to avoid confusion amongst other things. I can’t imagine SitePoint having English and, say, Spanish versions. They’d have to launch SitioPunto or whatever :slight_smile:
Now there’s an idea… an italian version of SitePoint… :smiley:

5

I wasn’t really talking about the customers; referring to as ‘English generally being considered the language of the web’. I was talking about the web master needing to know some English words if they were to code by hand and not WYSINWYG. :slight_smile:

You wouldn’t have heard the “phrase” above before because it’s regional dialect and word usage. I was just proving a point a translation tool won’t work in those circumstances. :lol:

6

Guido, firstly might I say, you’re English is simply fabulous :smiley:

I’m always torn with this translation issue particularly with my personal blog also. I never know whether or not to add that spiffy Google translator widget, I just end up leaving it until perhaps I do happen to have someone who might complain. Maybe that’s not the best approach ever, sort of like, I’ll cross that bridge if or when I come to it, but if I did include it, how many do I specify, where do you draw the line - perhaps approaching it in terms of something that compliments your visitor stats could be a good starting point!? I’ll have to investigate it further as you can see I’m still a bit green with that stuff! Saul, how does one market research that sort of stuff and don’t say Google it, because I’m already on it! So ha! But seriously, are there any quick pointers you can recommend? :smiley: :confused2

It’s interesting you mention about the accuracy and comparison of say a translation service vs. a native speaker - I guess for a “localised” niche website the native speaker would be the best choice IMO, particularly by incorporating the local colloquialisms - that would seem much friendlier and welcoming rather than a cold official speaking translation service! I suppose it would give it more appeal to the local target audience too.

Over here in Ireland nearly all our “official” websites must have the Irish/Gaelige translation for the Irish speaking population, same as documentation/signage. Even though the majority of people, if not all, speak English fluently, there are still those who are deadset on reading/conversing in Irish exclusively! Is it like that over there?

Do you think it’s worth being like our lovely Mentor Guido here, I mean, not just in terms of personality :lol: I mean, in terms of say being multi-lingual - does it go hand in hand with Web Development? Surely it would be highly desirable to a client that was looking for say a multi-lingual website to have their “Multi-lingual” Web Dev person as a one stop shop so to speak - those translation services can be pretty expensive! Should we all start brushing up on our Spanish, German and Chinese?!! :eek:

7

Thank you.

Saul, how does one market research that sort of stuff and don’t say Google it, because I’m already on it! So ha! But seriously, are there any quick pointers you can recommend? :smiley: :confused2

Interesting question. I wouldn’t know. Let’s see if Saul and others can give us an answer.

It’s interesting you mention about the accuracy and comparison of say a translation service vs. a native speaker - I guess for a “localised” niche website the native speaker would be the best choice IMO, particularly by incorporating the local colloquialisms - that would seem much friendlier and welcoming rather than a cold official speaking translation service! I suppose it would give it more appeal to the local target audience too.

When I said ‘translation service’ I was talking about automated stuff (like the google widget).

Over here in Ireland nearly all our “official” websites must have the Irish/Gaelige translation for the Irish speaking population, same as documentation/signage. Even though the majority of people, if not all, speak English fluently, there are still those who are deadset on reading/conversing in Irish exclusively! Is it like that over there?

If I’m correct, it’s like that in some regions of Italy (up north). In the rest of Italy there’s lots of dialects, but the only official language is Italian.

Do you think it’s worth being like our lovely Mentor Guido here, I mean, not just in terms of personality :lol: I mean, in terms of say being multi-lingual - does it go hand in hand with Web Development? Surely it would be highly desirable to a client that was looking for say a multi-lingual website to have their “Multi-lingual” Web Dev person as a one stop shop so to speak - those translation services can be pretty expensive! Should we all start brushing up on our Spanish, German and Chinese?!! :eek:

I don’t know about that. For example, I don’t do any translations. It’s nice to be able to speak to clients in their own language, but don’t you mostly find them near you? And English should get you a long way with foreign customers. Unless of course you really want to penetrate the Chinese market :wink:

8

It is easier to translate a website than you think. It is very easy to hire a freelance translator from elance.com, freelancer.com, and other websites who will be able to translate your whole webpage for ~$100-$200. That price is completely worth it in my opinion. Providing support in another language is another story but Google translate may be sufficient for most basic inquiries. You can’t provide phone support but it may not be that important. If it can open up your website to new markets that may be interested in your product then why not. There are over a billion people who speak Chinese and a billion that speak Spanish. Sure would be nice to increase your market to them :wink:

9

The question is … how good a job are they doing? (And is that $100-200 per page? If so, that’s going to get very expensive very quickly)

Unless you get a sample of translations checked by a true bilingual speaker, how can you be sure that they aren’t just running it through Babelfish and giving you whatever rubbish it spits out?

10

yeah… sometime it’s important to translator when we are working on some important project and we find a site in different language, here we need translator to convert the site content or language in the language we want to read. :slight_smile:

11

Yes, sometimes it is. But are you talking about automatic translators (like the Google language tools) ? And what do you think about the quality of these translators? Good enough? Or would you rather have a site that offers you the info in your language without having to use these translation tools?

12

Just to give an example of translation tool results: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/php-34/multiple-update-quries-750108.html#post4856622

I wonder what the original text was? :smiley:

13

Unfortunately, we can’t say that about you :stuck_out_tongue:

The best pointer I can give is… wait for it… Google! :lol: We need to discover other sites in other languages and what’s the best way to do that if not Google. We need to see if there are other sites and what they’re doing. Say you have an ecommerce site selling shoes and you want to expand to foreign countries. You make a list of countries you can ship to and find out the keywords. If there are ecommerce sites selling shoes in those languages, you’re good to go. If there are none, there’s no business.

You can further research the keywords and sites using various tools (Google keyword tool, alexa, compete, etc.) and see how much traffic there is, what are the demographics, what other related sites there are, etc. You can go a long way doing it, but the main thing is, if you see shops everywhere, people are buying.

But as I said, support and community is key. You can’t expect to show people a few pages in their native language and have them to wave credit cards at you. People are after experience, more so if it’s a community. And that definitely doesn’t mean you can get away with auto translators to do support! It’s even worse than an auto translated website.

In fact, I think it rarely makes sense to have multiple languages on a website other than ecommerce shop. Most often it makes more sense to create a completely separate site. It makes even less sense if you as the owner don’t know the language at all. For instance, what good would do having your blog translated to Chinese when you can’t even tell a difference between a normal comment and spam. Your site is about communication with your visitors and you can’t communicate - it’s futile.

Someone has a crush on Guido :shifty:

I don’t think it does other that the technical aspect of having a multi-lingual site. Targeting foreign markets is a business decision.

I’ve learned it the hard way. It’s definitely not that easy. At the very least you need someone you trust who knows the language and can proof read it.

The translation is usually paid for per word. I don’t remember how much I paid for translation but it wasn’t that expensive. And oh by the way, if anyone needs English to Spanish (or vice versa) translation done, molona gets my testimonial. :smiley:

14

In my case my website mainly is English but my target audience is from foreign countries. They read and write English quite well.

However I want to have my website ranked higher in these international search engines (google.de for example)

So I create one or several landing pages in these languages and try to get back links to it/them through forum profile links in the same language and a blog that is exclusively written in that language.

15

And does that work? Do you get these pages ranked higher than your english pages? And even more important, do you increase your audience through those pages? Do you get more sales from those countries?

16
  1. How accessible should your website be in terms of language support?
  1. How many language options should you offer to your visitors other than English (or your native language)?

Depends on your market, it should cover the people needed to be covered.

My country has three official languages and soon to have 4, which includes, Greek, English, Turkish and Russian. Not to mention Armenian and Arabic. Most people either know Greek or English so websites tend to be developed with these in-mind. Some investment-style websites have Russian because of the apparent investment from Russian nationals.

  1. Do you think it’s important to offer the option of translating your website to any given language?

Again, depends on your market. The small country I live in has lots of different languages and we all know Babelfish’s sub-standard translation won’t cover those languages to a quality standard . But apart from that it’s not viable to cover all the languages here. In a way it would discourage minorities to learn Greek, which is not ideal, particularly in a long-term view. The cost of translating in all those languages mixed in with the small market won’t make it profitable for companies to have all those languages.

  1. Do you think using website translation services are a good alternative to having a “native” multi-lingual site?

From a cost point of view, yes. The standard won’t be there but you’ll get the gist of what is trying to be said.

  1. Does having your website available in numerous languages really increase your potential sales/exposure to the World Wide Web?

Depends on your market. To many yes, to others no. Arabs here tend to be of political refuge status with little to no money, so having your site targeting for my local market in Arabic would certainly generate little or no sales.

  1. Does it eliminate competition in the same field?

Not necessarily. Most people know English of Greek here. So if you have both those languages you’ve covered 70% of the population, and 99% of the people who’ve got the money to pay for your services.

  1. When is enough really enough in terms of the amount of languages you should support?

When you’re happy that you’ve covered your targeted market.

I’ve had experience dealing with a 500 page website with 4 languages. I think you’re missing a crucial topic here, managing your multilingual website. Nobody expects you to fluently read and write in 4 languages so how would you go about maintain it.

Imagine you have 4 mirror websites, and each of those sites needs to have the same content in 4 languages. Now imagine removing one sentence in a paragraph on one of the languages, how would this affect the remaining languages, as they too need to be updated. How would this affect the entire paragraph, or even the web-page, and how much will all this translation cost? Is it really worth the hassle? Do you understand were I am getting at.

Even if you have 4 translator working for you online, how do you know what they are translating is correct? If you’re representing a large multinational company how can you protect your image. To many having their site in English is an easier solution to these problems.

17

This topic is very interesting.
By default, I make multilanguage websites, and I have to tell you all that the technical aspect of things is much bigger and much more complicated than you might think.

I’m not talking about simple text translations of multiple html pages, and I’m definitely not going to use google translate’s mess of a translation.
I mean websites with a multilanguage CMS or social websites with multiple languages.

The major problem is the lacking UTF-8 support, for many databases and php, obviously there are workarounds, but it takes a while to find each one.

Then there is the logical ordering of languages, for example, is all the content translated or can it be unique for one language.

Also the database design differs greatly, as you have to have to use id’s instead of words, while the words are fetched from tables with all the values for each language.
so the SQL becomes significantly more complex, and the server side selection, insertion/updates also increases in the amount of code required, significantly I might add.

Obviously if you plan to support a language you will need someone who speaks it, who can help you translate the interface buttons, while for text you need to hire a separate expert.

Generally I make websites support multiple languages even if it’s a single language website, so that later on I could add it without having to re-do the whole website.

  1. How accessible should your website be in terms of language support?

As accessible as you can support.

  1. How many language options should you offer to your visitors other than English (or your native language)?

As many as you can support, or native + english.

  1. Do you think it’s important to offer the option of translating your website to any given language?

I think every website should support native + english, and every person on earth should speak they native language and english :slight_smile:

  1. Do you think using website translation services are a good alternative to having a “native” multi-lingual site?

No

  1. Does having your website available in numerous languages really increase your potential sales/exposure to the World Wide Web?

yes, often greatly.

  1. Does it eliminate competition in the same field?

no, but it opens up other language fields that might not have competition.

  1. When is enough really enough in terms of the amount of languages you should support?

Ideally as many as you can.

18

Multi-language sites and certainly a nightmare. When we developed ours, it was a matter of translating everything. Our CMS did support UTF-8. The most challenging part was syncronizing the content. It’s easy to make a mess of such a site especially if they are frequently updated. To most I advise a single-language. The good thing about where I am is that many use English as the official language.

@YuriKolovsky

I am interested to know how it’s increased your market sales. I am not from Spain so it’s a bit hard for me to understand. I come from a country were English is widely used. Are there people in Spain who lack English skills? Do you develop sites for people in countries who lack English skills? In terms of managing the website, do you find any issues there. I understand I am going off topic but it’s certainly something interesting to cover.

19

A good point. Of course, the maintenance of all the languages has to be taken into account as well. Maintaining only one language (your own) and letting the others become out-of-date is not a good idea.

But even if you could, would it be useful? Would it be worth it?

20

Yes I get more sales for sure. About 100%-200% new customers from Germany and Austria at first. Now it’s slow to 10%-20% mostly because I do not aggressively build back links for German landing page any more (switched to another language).

I found that it’s easier to rank high in google.de than google.com due to less competition.