Before translating your website, I highly recommend getting a full statistics breakdown of your website visitors, their locations, time spent on your website, and the pages they most view. The best tool I’ve come across thus far to do this is Statscounter.com. They offer a free and paid web based statistics tool for any website or blog.Once you get a full report of your website’s daily activity, decided what countries and cities your niche target audience is coming from, and decide what languages you want to translate your website to.
• The first method of translation I highly recommend is the use of translation scripts for websites or plugins for blogs. You can generally cut and paste the scripts into your web pages or download and install the plugins into your blogs.
• The second method involves using a language translation tool for your website that typically translates english text into most other langauges and vice versa. This is a manual process and not the best recommended. Some very popular and frequently used translation tools are offered by Google, Altavista, Babelfish, and Dictionary.com. You simply type or cut and paste your english text in a form and select the language you want to translate your text to.
• The third method is hiring a translation firm that specializes in website translations, but make sure their software is compatible with the programming language of your website. They should be able to handle HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and simple texts.
• Search engine optimization is top priority for any website in any language, so include the appropriate foreign keywords in your page title, first paragraphs of every page, images, meta tags (keep to a minimum), and tag labels on your blogs.
• Proofread and copyedit your work. Remember to tweak your website to the foreign audiences needs, and be careful and sensitive of word usage. You don’t want to lose website visitors with a translation that comes across as offensive into any specific language.
It’s important to reach international web users to increase your website profit because ecommerce has exploded in the European markets with the Euro as the world’s dominant currency. Other incentives to translate are that the Japanese business to business market is a whopping 140 trillion yens almost twice as that of American B2B, and India’s B2B is equally growing at a tremendous rate. Ecommerce for example in Japan has grown about 13% while the U.S. has grown about 6%. In India, it’s grown 30% on average anually. All these countries have a potential gold mine of web users looking to use your products or services because they trust U.S. based businesses.
Don’t be left out of potential huge profits and web users because of a language barrier.
Written by Wade Nembhard
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