Create a multilingual site in 6 steps!

How do you create a multilingual site in 6 steps? This question may seem overly specific... until the day you open your business to every corner of the globe! In that exciting yet hectic moment, you will have a thousand things on your mind, a thousand tasks to finish: it’s worth taking the time now, with a clear head, to understand how to break down the process of creating a successful multilingual site.

Are you planning to grow your business to theinternational and would like to offer content in multiple languages on your site?

It’s an excellent idea, but it still requires some preparation. Here are our tips to help you create a multilingual site.

1. Define your new target audience

Whether you’re creating a new site or adding languages to your existing site, you’ll need to define your target.

Why is this so important? Because there’s no perfect site content: there are only sites that match—or don’t match—the specific audience they target. Everything starts there: when you know who you’re addressing, you find the right topic, the appropriate tone, and the words that will resonate with a particular segment of the population.

What kind of visitors do you want to attract to your site? To help with its creation, start by defining your personas.

Then build your editorial line so it interests your target and helps you develop your personal or company branding.

Do you already have a website? This step is still necessary. Foreign readers or buyers don’t necessarily have the same interests or tastes.

What appeals to a French buyer may not be as successful in Asia. Refocusing your offer for the page dedicated to that audience is essential to communicate effectively.

It’s true this step can take time, especially if it includes a proper field survey. But its results can be transferable and save time in other areas of your business: marketing, communications... So it’s a matter of taking a step back to move forward, minimizing pitfalls linked to cultural biases (a product that works in one country can fail miserably in another if it ignores cultural differences) and ultimately hitting the mark as soon as you enter foreign markets.

We know you’re impatient, but we assure you that preliminary research is always worth it!

2. Full or partial translation of your website?

Is it useful to translate your entire website? That's the first question you need to ask yourself. The simplest approach is to translate only what will be useful to your readers and highlight your site or business.

However, translating all of your communication materials makes it easier for your new audience to understand your activity.

If you're dealing with a hurried prospect, a simple translation of your homepage may indeed be enough. But if you're dealing with a rational, cautious prospect who is used to making detailed technical comparisons before buying, who reads descriptive PDFs and the Terms and Conditions in full, you'll gain a lot by translating every corner of your site.

You show your prospects that you value them and that you are making an effort to reach them. They will therefore be more inclined to listen to you and ultimately become one of your customers.

Also think about your goals. What will this translation be used for? To increase your sales? To retain your foreign customers? To boost traffic to your site?

Revise your texts so they match your visitors' expectations and your commercial objectives.

Indeed, the approach will differ depending on the goal. If you want to increase traffic to your site to first get known abroad, you should edit your translations for strong emotional impact, to spark curiosity and sharing among your users. On the other hand, if your aim is to retain customers, you should focus on in-depth expertise in your articles to convince prospects that you are a reliable specialist in your field.

3. Find a good professional translator

To find a good freelance translator, translation platforms and services such as Traduc.com make their network of professional translators available to you.

In addition, on Traduc.com we offer turnkey translations for your e-commerce site thanks to our project managers. Our project managers oversee your translation project in-house from A to Z. Simply send them your files (Word, PDF, PPT, XLS, HTML, JSON, JS, etc.), indicate your working languages and delivery deadline, and they handle everything: assembling your team of professional translators specialized in your field and delivering your files while respecting your style guide.

These may seem like minor procedural details, but they make all the difference for professional clients, particularly for large orders and multilingual translations.

Furthermore, it is possible to add an “SEO” option to the requested translation. The translator will not just transcribe the text into the target language: they will also research the keywords most frequently used in a given region (and this is not limited to Google, which has a near-monopoly in the West: for example, the Yandex search engine predominates in Russia) to optimize your SEO internationally as well.

4. Write a translation style guide

It's easy, when outsourcing a multilingual translation project, to want to delegate the entire task for convenience. As far as the translation itself is concerned, we tend to agree with you: the translator is a specialist and you can trust them on grammar and vocabulary.

However, that translator does not know your company — or does not know it well: you are the specialist. It is therefore up to you to communicate the main aspects of your company, your communication strategy, the message you want to convey and the tone to use. You should also decide (knowing that the budget allocated to translation may vary according to this factor) whether preliminary documentation prior to translation is necessary.

In short, know that for producing a good translation, the translator must understand your world. In addition to the texts they will have to translate, they will need your style guide. In this document, you will address the following points:

Translation instructions may seem trivial at first glance: English or French quotation marks? Hyphens, em dashes or en dashes? However, the devil is often in the details: for example, if you move from a concise language like English (one single term to address a second person: “you”) to a more analytical language like German or French (where the distinction between informal and formal address is clear), you must decide in advance whether a formal or informal tone is desired, to avoid misunderstandings and stressful, time-consuming back-and-forths after the translated file is delivered.

5. Use transcreation

The difficulty of creating a multilingual site is not only due to the number of languages (Indo-European, Semitic, Oriental…), or even to differences in alphabets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese…). Translating itself requires broad lexical and grammatical knowledge to build bridges of words and meaning from one language to another. But translating also means making one culture converse with another. This is where a somewhat special branch of translation comes in, called transcreation.

In addition to the lexical and grammatical skills expected of any good translator, transcreation adds a strong artistic and cultural component to translation, because it is no longer a word-for-word rendering but the creation of a message adapted to the social codes and cultural representations of the target country.

In the case of a multilingual website, this transcreation dimension can therefore play an important role, especially if your company’s international expansion involves civilizations that are distant from our own on issues such as attitudes toward the body, family, religion…

6. Translation plugin or professional translator?

Does your site already exist? Ideally, involve the developer who built it and ask them to make the necessary additions.

If you built your site yourself, some CMS platforms like WordPress offer plugins that let you add one or more languages. Once the plugin is installed, create your pages and add your translated content.

Don’t panic — for the most popular plugins like Polylang, very good tutorials are available.

However, you must not neglect the translation quality of your website.

Indeed, the quality of the translation is the best guarantor of the beginning of a relationship of trust with your foreign prospects. It will determine whether your foreign prospects feel considered and valued in their language and culture, or are instead forced to read your site in a language that is not their native tongue, which will therefore speak much less to their deeper emotions.

That's why we recommend you hire a specialist translator in your field. Contact us right now on Traduc.com.