What Are The Top Mistakes To Avoid With Website Translations?

Your website acts as a virtual store window and is responsible for making a positive first impression for potential customers. Remember, a successful website must be engaging, full of useful information, concise, and easy to navigate. This can be a difficult task even when you are designing a site in your native language, so you can imagine how a website translation project presents its own set of problems.

As a business leader, you need to put measures into place to make sure that you don’t make any major mistakes that may downgrade your website quality and harm your business. In this post, we will discuss several mistakes to avoid when you are in the initial stages of a website translation project.

No Plans To Accommodate Text Changes

Throughout the process, you need to confirm that your website still looks appealing once it has been translated. Ensure that all the text is visible since it is prone to changes following translation. Typically, when words are translated into a different language, they expand in size, which often means that they won’t fit as well into the original space provided when the website was created. Discuss plans with your translation services provider to accommodate text size changes, as you don’t want to be caught off guard by unyielding large paragraphs of translated text.

No Proper Proofreading

This should go without saying, but sometimes it helps to have a reminder since translation projects require a lot of work. Don’t skimp on proofreading your translated website. After you have invested considerable time and resources in creating a site that presents information to a new market, why would you invite any chances for mistakes? Be ruthless with proofreading to ensure it is accurate. It is always recommended to have a linguist perform a website review. This review will ensure that all text was placed correctly, no text was left out, and that everything flows correctly. Native readers will surely appreciate it.

Work With Professionals

Some business leaders avoid hiring professional translation services, considering it to be too expensive. Or, perhaps, they have a preconceived notion about the usefulness of translation services. Believe us, though. It is worth it to hire a professional company, as they have access to a team of qualified translators who can complete high volumes of work in short time frames. This doesn’t mean that you should blindly hire any translation company, though. You need to hire a company that can deliver the level of quality you have come to expect from your source language. Also, if you aren’t convinced about the variable quality of machine translations, be sure to read this post.

Keywords Get Lost In Translation

Proper keyword selection is an integral component of a healthy SEO strategy. Unfortunately, direct translations of English keywords typically do not provide the best results. You will need to work closely with localization experts to select the proper long-tail keyword phrases, as direct translations typically neglect to take cultural cues into consideration. This does not mean that we want you to get rid of the English keywords that you have carefully researched. Rather, we would suggest using these as a “jumping-off” point rather than a fixed list. A localization expert can help you to brainstorm alternatives.

iTi | CT Translation Services

While it is important to translate your businesses’ website, you want to make sure that you present a professional experience. The best way to avoid embarrassing gaffes and obfuscated messages is to contact a professional translation service company that works with native speakers of the language you plan to target. Choosing the correct words for the right message while still remaining faithful to your core values is a delicate art and as many international companies have learned, one misstep can be quite costly. Contacting us from the start will save you time and money in the long run.