The advent of internet and globalization has made large business organizations to reach out to a big target audience across the globe, and your customers who reside in various countries, do not follow and communicate in one language anymore.
1. 7 Reasons why website translation is not working
The advent of internet and globalization has made large business organizations to reach out to a big
target audience across the globe, and your customers who reside in various countries, do not follow
and communicate in one language anymore. Tapping international and non-English speaking
audience has become a priority, if businesses have to be successful. Gone are the days, when
communication and business happened in one universal language, English. If your target audience
has to become your esteemed customer, then you have to break the language barrier. This has
mostly been tried to address to website translators. These website translators, allow the visitors to
visit and have a look at your website, in their own language. This allows a whole lot of various
language target audience to flock and have a look at your website. We all know that there are less
English speaking internet users, and hence having website translation presents the information to
these thousands of users who can be your potential target audience.
Various reasons why website translation might not be helpful enough
But off late,
website translation may not be a smart solution to reach out to your potential clients, due to various
reasons. You might not achieve 100% translation accuracy for the website translation, because
2. phrases are not put out professionally well in the other language, and it does not make an impact, as
done by the original language. Website translation might go wrong due to various reasons discussed
Automatic or Machine translations being used: Machine translation might promise you
quick and cheaper solutions, but do not get carried away by the same, as they do not
guarantee professional flow and appropriate structured translation as humans do. If humans
are your target audience, then the right tone, dialect and colloquialism in which the
language is conveyed also becomes very important, that might not be delivered through
machines or automatic translations. Cultural and local content sometimes is seen missing
when machine translation is used.
Knowledge of relevant subject matter missing: Whenever a translation ought to be done,
there are specific rules, and the machine or computer, just obeys the rules, and does the
translation without specifically trying to understand or correlate industry jargons.
Sometimes the machine fails to understand the nuances of the language, and hence results in
poor translated documents. Sometimes, to ensure appropriate translated text, ensure
localization is utilized. (E.g., Currency, Date formats etc). Localisation basically ensures
adapting your website to the culture of the new market.
Translation between letter-based and symbolic-based languages: Translation between
letter-based and symbolic-based languages, especially English to Chinese becomes
extremely difficult when there is website translation. The flow of the language, dialect, and
syntax is lost. Professional and 100% accurate translation can rarely be guaranteed.
HTML, PHP and WordPress related issues: Most of the website translators support
HTML and hence work very well with HTML templates. But, off late, most blogs and
websites are created through WordPress or PHP, and our website translators, are not
comfortable with WordPress, PHP blogs. So, the translation here, might be very crude and
3. messy. Your entire translation work may go for a toss. Hence, ensuring that the translators
that work on multiple platforms is a must.
Expression is missed: Emotion seems to be missing when website translators are used.
Addressing a person with respect, the tone, the stature, and mood cannot be guaranteed
completely while using translators. The human touch appears to be lost somewhere.
Fear of Losing SEO Keywords: The translation of a website, can jumble up the keywords,
and hence result in the key sentences or phrases being lost, resulting in lower search engine
rankings. Hence improving your SEO for multiple languages plays a very important role.
Context based translation might not happen: Every word might have several meanings
or synonyms, but deducing the right meaning with reference to a context that is being
written is very important. Humans can understand the context, and use the right word, while
translating, where most translators fail.
So, when you want to reach out to a larger audience, and look to translate your website, you need to
consider above mentioned points, and decide whether you want to invest on an expensive translator,
or still go in for a trusted human translation service. To know more : beltranslation.org