Most companies that approach us for website translation into multiple languages fall into one of three categories:
Large conglomerates that have already started doing business abroad and have a solution that they believe works for them.
Small businesses that never even considered expanding beyond their local borders until their sales stagnated.
Ambitious startups that want to reach all markets right away.
Despite their differences, most have one thing in common – they don’t consider localization to be a fundamental part of their business. Instead, it’s often treated as an additional task after a company has exhausted its local options. Internally, this causes leaders to take a piecemeal approach to the entire strategy, which makes it very challenging to launch more than one wordpress web design agency website at a time. However, with a deeper understanding of the complete process of translating websites into multiple languages, any company can be better prepared to handle multiple languages in international markets .
Understanding the True Complexity of Multilingual Website Translation
Most companies start their multilingual localization process with a very detailed approach. Typically, they will submit a 10-page website along with a quote request and receive a basic estimate in response. They will then dive into the full project based on their initial impression of that quote. However, remaining too focused on the low translation price can cause them to miss many key factors that could cause scope creep, such as costs associated with hosting, infrastructure, management, maintenance, and more. This means that as they expand their website, with twice as many pages, keywords, strategies, and clients to support, they could potentially double their costs. This problem occurs when companies focus only on the translation aspect and not on the three strategies necessary to establish a new market: globalization, internationalization, and localization.
Globalization
Globalization is the overarching strategy. It is the broad plan that establishes the right markets to target based on the information available. This process requires a lot of research and insight, but is often overlooked by companies. A big-picture strategy should be data-driven, meaning a company uses the information it has to make market decisions rather than just targeting popular languages.
Internationalization
Internationalization is the next step. This requires evaluating the product and seeing what it would take to make it work in different countries. When it comes to content, leaders can look at things like your existing code, your variables and regular expressions, and how that will translate into any given language. Internationalization ensures that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every market you enter.
Location
Localization breaks down the granular details of your go-to-market. This includes things like how you’ll assign linguists, automate your workflow, update your websites, and ensure your entire content ecosystem is maintained. We’ve seen too many companies start at this stage without considering globalization and internationalization, and suffer the consequences of inadequate programs and lackluster market launches. To be successful in translating websites into multiple languages, you need to complete these three steps in the proper order. First, you globalize to see where your product will fit best. Then, you internationalize by making your content easy to translate. Finally, you execute the plan with a full localization strategy . For obvious reasons, it’s best not to try to target multiple markets at exactly the same time.
Large conglomerates that have already started doing business abroad and have a solution that they believe works for them.
Small businesses that never even considered expanding beyond their local borders until their sales stagnated.
Ambitious startups that want to reach all markets right away.
Despite their differences, most have one thing in common – they don’t consider localization to be a fundamental part of their business. Instead, it’s often treated as an additional task after a company has exhausted its local options. Internally, this causes leaders to take a piecemeal approach to the entire strategy, which makes it very challenging to launch more than one wordpress web design agency website at a time. However, with a deeper understanding of the complete process of translating websites into multiple languages, any company can be better prepared to handle multiple languages in international markets .
Understanding the True Complexity of Multilingual Website Translation
Most companies start their multilingual localization process with a very detailed approach. Typically, they will submit a 10-page website along with a quote request and receive a basic estimate in response. They will then dive into the full project based on their initial impression of that quote. However, remaining too focused on the low translation price can cause them to miss many key factors that could cause scope creep, such as costs associated with hosting, infrastructure, management, maintenance, and more. This means that as they expand their website, with twice as many pages, keywords, strategies, and clients to support, they could potentially double their costs. This problem occurs when companies focus only on the translation aspect and not on the three strategies necessary to establish a new market: globalization, internationalization, and localization.
Globalization
Globalization is the overarching strategy. It is the broad plan that establishes the right markets to target based on the information available. This process requires a lot of research and insight, but is often overlooked by companies. A big-picture strategy should be data-driven, meaning a company uses the information it has to make market decisions rather than just targeting popular languages.
Internationalization
Internationalization is the next step. This requires evaluating the product and seeing what it would take to make it work in different countries. When it comes to content, leaders can look at things like your existing code, your variables and regular expressions, and how that will translate into any given language. Internationalization ensures that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every market you enter.
Location
Localization breaks down the granular details of your go-to-market. This includes things like how you’ll assign linguists, automate your workflow, update your websites, and ensure your entire content ecosystem is maintained. We’ve seen too many companies start at this stage without considering globalization and internationalization, and suffer the consequences of inadequate programs and lackluster market launches. To be successful in translating websites into multiple languages, you need to complete these three steps in the proper order. First, you globalize to see where your product will fit best. Then, you internationalize by making your content easy to translate. Finally, you execute the plan with a full localization strategy . For obvious reasons, it’s best not to try to target multiple markets at exactly the same time.
