Translating your website can be much trickier than it appears. While there are plenty of resources available, a poorly translated website isn’t good for your brand or business.

If your multilingual website isn’t performing as well as you expected, then chances are you have some common website translation errors holding your performance back. Let’s take a look at the top website translation errors that you should fix as soon as possible.

Google Translate Failure

A common mistake that many businesses make when it comes to translation on a budget is utilizing free machine translation tools like Google Translate. While the ability to translate in an instant may seem attractive, the translation service isn’t exactly foolproof. It’s rather common for free online translation tools to result in awkward phrasing, grammar and vocabulary errors.

When building your website for the English-speaking world, you likely spent a lot of time or paid a professional copy writer to get the copy on your website right. In the case of translating a website, hiring a professional is a must.

Lost Layout

Having a well-designed website is important in making a good impression on your customers. Something else to consider if how translating the words on the page will affect your web layout.

Depending on the language, text may take up different amounts of space on the page, both horizontally and sometimes vertically. Translation and design must often be considered in tandem, as your pay layout may need to be fiddled with to accommodate translated text. Your translator can also try to minimize text expansion and contraction by modifying phrasing and word choice, while preserving the original message.

Multilingual SEO

If your customers can’t find your site, simply put – they won’t come. Does your website rank well in Google… in English? If so, that’s great. But those rankings won’t necessarily translate in your other target languages unless you get on top of multilingual SEO.

It’s often not just the copy that users see on a page that requires translation for multilingual SEO. Fields like meta tags, alt descriptions, and metadata should all be optimized in the target language as well.

Form Translation

Don’t hinder your conversion efforts by offering customers contact forms, sign-up forms or checkout forms that they can’t read.

Missing Out on Localization

Translating your web copy from one language to another is definitely a good start, but translation alone is not enough. Cultural difference must be taken into account, and therefore localization is a must. Localizing your website goes a step beyond merely translating the web copy by more effectively targeting customers in your desired markets.

Localization can mean several things – Changing the color scheme and site design to accommodate cultural preferences, recreating a campaign from the ground up to make it more effective, and ensuring that payment options reflect local preferences.

Mobile Optimization

In some countries, a localized website won’t stand a chance if it’s not optimized for mobile. In many countries around the world, the majority of web users are accessing sites via mobile devices. If your website doesn’t offer a good mobile experience, consider all of your efforts worthless.

Want to make your website an international success? We’re available to help. Let’s Get in Touch!