Website Translation - Expanding Your Business Or Outright Nightmare?

Website Translation - Expanding Your Business Or Outright Nightmare

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There is a lot of talk about website localization, and how it can boost your Internet business. But most of the talk is from people who actually want to sell you the localization services, and there is little talk about the pitfalls and perils that such translation might entail.

The most horrendous one is obviously that the translation is of low quality. You might have spent a fortune optimizing your site for the search engines, but a low quality (worse: a machine-generated) translation will scare your visitors as quickly as they arrive.

The second pitfall is that most translation agencies don't have the knowledge to handle such a type of translation. Hint: If they ask you to provide the text in Word, or promise to provide it in that format, RUN! A good website translator will actually insist on receiving html, not only because he can translate it directly without any need for another format, but also because there are many other things -apart the web text- that need translation: The title, description, keywords, tags, etc.

Another problem is that you may have spent thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars improving your search engine ranking, for specific keywords, including long tails, and the simple translation of such keywords will provide you a nice score in the search machines... at page 100. The careful fine tuning of the pages and anchor texts suddenly become worthless in the target language... unless the translator knows about SEO as about translation. Though you always have the alternative to hire a SEO specialist in the target language after performing the translation, and optimize those pages. But you pay twice for the same job. And if you don't, your #1 ranking in English may become complete invisibility for the (expensive) translated pages.

There are other horrors in this particular field, such as scripts that suddenly start mixing languages, links that point to a page in a different language or even to nowhere in particular, tags that have disappeared or even worse, appearing as #1 in adult web site searches when you are not even involved in that industry...

But the worst of all is that you might actually be "sold" into performing this kind of effort even if your site would not benefit at all from such translation. There are a lot of marketing gurus out there that will tell you to localize, and will offer to perform it for a "reasonable" price, even though very often such effort is not only useless but even counter-productive. An inadequate localization can hurt you much more than no localization at all.

Yes, provided you follow the 3 golden rules for website translation economics, you could actually make money with the translation. But you better make sure that whoever takes care of the localization knows what he is doing!

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