Does Your Website Need Translation?

by November 23, 2020

Why translate a website?

As a website owner, your website is intended to be read by your target audience. What good does your website accomplish if it can’t be read by your customers?

What language does your target audience speak? English? What if your customers speak a different language? If your business serves customers or clients across multiple languages, it might be time to expand to a multilingual website!

How does website translation work?

If your website is built with WordPress (most of our websites are), we can translate it using affordable 3rd party software called WPML (The WordPress Multilingual Plugin). This fabulous software is one of the most popular website translation plugins available and works seamlessly with WordPress, Divi, and most major plugins.

WPML first requires you to set your primary language (the language your website is already in), then check a box for every language you’d like to expand your website to. For most local business websites, 1-2 languages will be all you need. For example, a Mexican restaurant might have its website available in English and Spanish. Do you think Greek would be necessary for a website like that? Or Italian? Likely not.

Next, you’ll need to list your translators. These are the multilingual individuals (likely employees on your team) who will be translating your website. You can translate the website yourself, but most business owners will have a multilingual person on their team handle the translation.

Finally, the translation software will pull every line, word, and sentence from the website, and your translators can login and translate every word. They can do this one web page at a time, and don’t forget the menus, images, footers, etc! WPML doesn’t miss a single word!

How can we help translate your website?

As your webmaster, we will setup the translation software and configure it based on your needs. This includes setting it up with your unique plugins and theme, choosing languages, and adding translators.

Since we at Pioneer Media are not multilingual, you’ll have 2 options:

  1. Translate the website yourself or have someone on your team do it.
  2. We can hire a 3rd party translator to translate your website.

Either way, someone fluent in both languages needs to manually translate each word on each web page. This is time-consuming, yes, but once the website is translated, it only needs to be translated again when content updates are made, such as new pages, blog posts, etc.

Conclusion

If you’re serving customers or clients across multiple languages, it’s crucial to have your website available in their native tongue. Fortunately, this is easy to accomplish with the right software, and at Pioneer Media, we have the tools and expertise to guide you through translating your valuable website!

Need To Translate Your Website?