The best way to translate a website

This is an interview with a professional designer of multilingual websites and a translator. We discussed the best ways to translate websites and the issues involved in the process.

You will learn many helpful nuggets from this interview.

The Full Interview:

The Main Takeaways of the interview:

Who is Tanya Quintieri:

She is an English to German and German to English translator.
Sher is a co-founder of an agency that provides international corporate solutions.
She is a designer of multilingual websites for different languages.
She works with different content management systems.

About The difference between translation and localization

Translation happens when you translate between languages that come from the same cultures.
localization is about taking into consideration the cultural background of the audience.
Images are a clear example of the difference between translation and localization.
The website UI is another clear example of localization. For example, the US websites collect the States, but this does not make sense in a German website.

Website content translation is not straightforward.

The original website content direct translation does not guarantee the same results in the translated copy.
People from different countries and languages use Google and search engines for different reasons.
Companies that don’t think about website accessibility lose about 20% of their website traffic.
Accessibility is about taking care of different browsers and devices, etc.
The local language should be used in the different communication methods on a website, such as chatbots.

The website translation should help the website to convert customers

The translated website should use the keywords that are used by people while searching online.
Considering keywords translation before the translation starts will help convert visitors into customers.
Consistency of terms and sentences across the website is important for the user experience.

What about Using Machine translation when it comes to website translation:

Using machine translation is better than hiring a cheap translator that delivers bad translations.
Website visitors will recognize the website is translated by a machine, such as Google Translate.
Machine translation doesn’t convert visitors into customers like a human translation will do.
It is always recommended to work with human translators who understand the domain.
Many smart machine translation engines understand the website translation process.
The language pair used can affect the quality of the machine translation engine.
Human translators should be familiar with the website translation tools.
If the translation is just for information purposes, a machine can do it.
Machine translation engines are not good at localizing websites.
Machine translation is faster, but not cheaper.

The website translation tools selection criteria.

It is preferable if the website translation software stores the translation in a form of memory.
Computer-Assisted Translation Tools (CAT tools) store the translation to reuse it in the future.
The software should support any language you may need to translate in the future.
The translator needs to be involved as soon as possible in the software selection process.
The software should help the website owner manage the translation process
It is recommended the translation be on the website owner’s servers.

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