Web site Translation as a Way to Promote Your Business Internationally
By Elena Mokeeva. Submitted on Thursday, December 22, 2005
About the author: Elena Mokeeva is a SEM consultant at e3internet. Having an MD in English linguistics and experience in teaching and
translating, she finds her current job extremely interesting, as it combines
marketing knowledge with first-hand language practice. Currently, Elena is consulting
for a UK Translation Agency Lingo24.
Today
every self-respecting company understands the advantages and power of
the Internet and runs one or several Web sites advertising its products
or services online. We all want to be recognised worldwide and invest a
lion’s share of our budget in offline international marketing.
At the same time we often forget about the advantages of international
Internet marketing. All that we can think of is creating another .com
Web site in English, adding the word “international” to its title. Why
do we forget that one third of all Internet users do not speak English,
and thus our “international” site is passing by all this mass of
potential clients (business partners)? With constantly growing quantity
and quality of non-English material on the Net they are more likely to
surf in their own language.
Today a multilingual Web site is becoming a necessity for international business due to a number of convincing reasons:
SEO Marketing. Multilingual Web
sites allow you to enter new markets. Local language search engines
will index your site and give you new links from within this market
area. In most non-English speaking countries, regional search engines
in their native language play much greater role than English-speaking
Google, Yahoo and MSN. Hence, you gain better positions, more new
visitors to your site (i.e. more potential customers) and more sales.
Company Image. Multilingual
sites create an image of a serious and respectable international
business, and will win over visitors from companies who have not made
this effort.
Customer-centric approach. It
allows your visitors to surf quickly and efficiently in their own
language. This gives your company and products an advantage over your
less prepared competitors.
Now you clearly understand that Web site translation can be a great help
in attracting foreign public to your business. However it has to be
done in such a way that people will end up buying your product.
To have a Web site translated means much more than get mere text
translation. There are numerous factors that have to be taken into
consideration. Actually, it is more correctly to speak about Web site
localisation, when you want the site successfully working in the market
of your target countries.
Localisation is defined as modifying a product to make it usable and suitable to a target market.
First of all, it implies culture-centric translation. Perfect
culture-centric translation makes the reader feel as if the content was
not translated, but originally written in the target language. It takes
into consideration the culture, style and language of the target
audience.
Using electronic translations for this purpose is not a good idea. The
decision to have your site translated by a human being, preferably a
native speaker, familiar with the culture, terminology and sayings of
the target language, is an ideal one.
Then, Web site localisation takes into account the appearance of your
Web pages. Are there pictures, colours or images that would cause
offence? A good Web site translation company will analyse your site and
offer you a cultural applicability consultation.
Further more, decent Web site translators will offer an after-care
service that assists in helping you with the small changes in future.
Some translation companies will even provide you with Internet
marketing services to help your site achieve high visibility in the
target country.
If you are serious about promoting your business among foreign Internet
users it is best to trust your Web site translation to proven
professionals. The leading UK translation company, Lingo24
can supply your company with these services.
Professional Web site localisation and culture-centric translation can become a very promising perspective for your business.
We focus mainly on Eastern European languages however, do not hesitate to contact us with any language pair and we will let you know our possibilities. We use CAT tools (Trados, SDLX) and cooperate only with reliable, proved native speakers to ensure the 100% quality delivered to our customers. We are looking forward to working with you soon. :-)
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