Multilingual websites are important to have a solid online presence if you are targeting international customers.
They can do a lot for your company:
- Allow for better chances to reach more extensive markets;
- Make it much easier for you to sell to individuals and businesses globally.
- Leave a positive impression and establish trust with your non-native target audience.
- Ensure better user experience and higher conversion rates;
- And much more…
Long story short, adding another language to your website means that you are about to multiply your reach and consequently get more business locally and abroad, and drive your business in the right way.
But below are a few practices you need to follow for your translated website to work.
When should you consider a multilingual website?
As a business owner, it’s important to consider the ‘when’ behind your major decisions.
When you decide to turn your single-language website into a multilingual one is important. By ‘when,’ we mean both timing and the situation that calls for translating or localizing your website.Several situations or cases may prompt you to consider website translation. It’s worth mentioning that these situations may or may not overlap.
mentioning that these situations may or may not overlap.
1. When You Want To Grow Your Business
The primary reason businesses consider multilingual websites is to grow their business. This may include adding new target audiences, expanding your geographical reach, increasing your revenue, or all of those reasons together.
2. When You Want To Reach A New Target Audience
Targeting a new audience can include bilingual or multilingual audiences in the same country or different countries.
For example, in many Arab countries today, there are bilingual natives as well as expatriates. So, creating a multi-language website is a good idea if you want to target expatriates in a certain country or region.
In the case of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), for example, your first choices are English and Arabic. Both languages are used by natives.
However, with a large number of expatriates in each of the 6 GCC countries, you may consider Urdu as a second or third option.
3. When You Want To Expand Your Geographical Reach
The third reason is expanding your geographical reach. Let’s say you’re an e-commerce store selling fashion products in France. You want to expand your audience and geographical reach to include neighboring countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.
To target people in these countries, you’ll need to prioritize German language translation for your website, followed by Italian.
Multilingual Websites Best Practice: Where do you start?
1. Ensure that Machine translation will not replace humans
Website translation is a daunting challenge that requires skilled translators who know how to deliver a professional translation that adapts to the target audience’s culture.
Many rely on machine translation to do the job, but a machine can’t deliver the meaning as a human does.
Multilingual websites’ best practices require you to rely on human translators who are well-versed in the cultural aspects of the target languages and have proper experience in the website’s field to easily detect any nuances in the text that machines cannot see.
2. Doing appropriate keyword research for the target languages.
Before you start your website translation, you first need to conduct keyword research.
Keywords are simply words or phrases written in the website content and make it possible for your potential customers to reach you via Search Engines. Keywords help you identify hidden opportunities and improve your ranking.
To start your keyword research, you need to understand the audience of your multilingual website and their search queries, and most importantly, to analyze the keywords your competitors use.
Top keyword research tools that you can use when translating your website.
- SEMrush: a complete SEO tool suite to carry out keyword research and improve your SEO rankings.
- AnswerThePublic: It presents keywords in a detailed visual format, although you can also see them in a list or download a .csv file of results.
- Ubersuggest: a free tool from Neil Patel that offers search volume data, keyword suggestions, and an idea of how difficult your keyword will be to rank for.
- Google’s Keyword Planner: It is designed for use by advertisers who want to run their ads on Google. However, it’s still a useful tool for SEO, and unlike other paid tools, this is free to use.
What is the best way to make a multilingual website?
3- Make sure Google Indexes your Translated Website Copy
Indexing your translated pages comes at the top of multilingual websites’ best practices. It is how Google works to analyze and understand the content and the files embedded in the translated page.
Make sure to submit a sitemap of your translated website in every language to Google Search Console. This will help your local website to rank for the target keywords your customers will use when searching online for your products or services.
4. Use best-in-class Document Management Systems DMS
Document management systems streamline the translation work and make it easy to update and create content. In most cases, businesses often have a dedicated team that is in charge of maintaining translations. DMSs simplify the management of multilingual content where editors and writers add the source content in their native languages. At the same time, the translators focus on the translation process – All from one single platform.
5- Decide on translation vs localization
One of the most important factors when deciding how you’ll create your multilingual website is to decide whether you’ll use translation or localization. Put simply, Website translation is when you decide you want to use one language to cover a region. For example, if you decide your website will cover the Middle East without specifying which countries you’re targeting, you should opt for Modern Standard Arabic translation. This is usually the case for SaaS, education, and e-learning sites. However, if you have an e-commerce site and you want to expand to several countries, the best option is localization. In this case, agencies like TranslationPartneruse Modern Standard Arabic as the basis and then begin localizing the content to suit each country and target audience.
6- Decide on your SEO strategy
This Step is super important for multilingual websites. Part of the success of any website today is its search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and strategy.SEO translation is an important element when translating online content. That’s why creating a multilingual website calls for understanding multilingual SEO and using either local SEO or international SEO.
7- Create a glossary
Some websites are larger and more niche than others. This calls for creating a glossary with the important terms in your project. Creating a glossary not only helps you speed up the website translation process.
8- Use transcreation when needed
Transcreation is a combination of translation and content creation. With website translation, you may have to use a degree of transcreation to ensure accuracy and clarity.
9- Use hreflang tags
“The hreflang attribute tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language,” explains SEO software website Moz.
Let’s say your website is available in 4 languages: English, Arabic, Japanese, and German. Having an hreflang tag tells Google which language to serve to which viewer coming from which country. It also tells Google which language to show based on users’ browsers.
10- Ensure graphics fit the target language
With translation and localization, there’s an important element that’s often overlooked, especially when translating a website or other forms of online content. It ensures that your translation and supporting graphics, design, and user experience fit your target audience.
Here’s a simple example: If you’re localizing your e-commerce website to Arabic for a Saudi audience, you’ll want to ensure that your designs aren’t revealing or inappropriate.
11- Include language-switching options
A best practice among multilingual websites is having your language icon appear as a drop-down menu for customers to choose the language they want to view your website in.
Multilingual website best practices dictate that you use the initials of a language or country instead of just the flag for that country.
An alternative would be to use both the initials and the flag. But using the flag alone for the language switching option isn’t recommended.
12- Test your multilingual website
Last but certainly not least, it’s important you know how to test your multilingual website before offering it to the public.
This step involves ensuring that your website is operational, links and buttons are working, and more.
Wrapping Up!
Your website is usually the first thing your customers see when coming across your business. Providing a multilingual website gives a positive and professional impression to all visitors.
Multilingual websites ensure a better user experience and make it easy for you to navigate through a broader market of global customers.
All you need to do to ensure multilingual websites’ best practices is to follow the most appropriate techniques that support your business processes and deliver high-quality translations while scaling your business with ease.
Author: Sherif abuzid
Sherif Abuzid is localization services consultant at TranslationPartner, with extensive experience in language services, digital marketing, and multilingual content strategy. He supports the creation and optimization of localized content and campaigns that help brands connect with global audiences and improve engagement across markets.
Sherif graduated from Helwan University, Faculty of Arts, English language department. You can check his LinkedIn profile here.
