Nowadays, companies wishing to successfully market their products require a series of resources aimed at advertising the services they provide and creating a relationship of interest, trust and want in their target customers. In order to accomplish this mission, market research studies offer a wide range of solutions and strategies that will usually be customized on a case-by-case basis. However, if there is one aspect that all of them have in common, it’s the recommendation to design a website for the brand including all the elements that can be useful to make it more widely known and to present its products in an appropriate manner. Such websites usually contain information about the organization, its scope of action, its business philosophy and, of course, the range of its services. Indeed, in our globalized era, not having an online presence is akin to not existing at all, and that is a situation that every company wishes to avoid.
In that sense, when we create a website, we do so taking into account various factors. One of them, perhaps the most important, is the type of customer we wish to target. While this category includes several considerations about aesthetics, language registry and so on, this is also a good time to ask ourselves in which languages we are going to make ourselves known. Indeed, most companies choose the language of the region in which they are based or their employees’ mother tongue as their first choice, but is that enough? Our first choice may be a language with a small number of speakers but we aim to reach a larger audience; although our first language may be English, we may consider translating the content of the website into another language; or perhaps we are designing a website for the first time and we want to create the content in all the languages that we believe are of some interest for our commercial purposes at the same time. What kind of advantages does all of this offer? How can we know the most suitable languages into which our website should be translated? Can we call what we do just “translation”? Today’s article will answer these questions.
While there is no set of steps that can be deemed a foolproof manner to check whether our choice in this matter is the most appropriate one, there are a series of resources that can certainly come in handy when making decisions in this regard.
Firstly, experts across the field recommend carrying out research on the traffic in an existing website since, if we want to know the best languages to translate our content into, there is no better approach than researching the locations from where we are visited, and the regions of the globe where we have generated the most interest. To achieve this, there are platforms today that provide in-built analytic tools to carry out this tracking, such as WordPress and Google Analytics. This could serve as an objective starting point for any business growth plan: approaching the prospective client in the language they master. While it can be said that many clients, depending on their sector, master a working language to navigate these portals, the possibility of accessing a website in our mother tongue tends to generate a warmer environment, greater trust and a better predisposition to engage in business dealings.
Another possible strategy is to go about researching the competition. If we have identified competitors that are further up the ladder in their internationalization process or whose performance has turned them into a benchmark that inspires us to do our best, it may be a sound idea to find out the markets and languages that they target. This will be helpful to become aware of any trends in our sector that we would be advised to follow, or to detect foreign markets that the competition has not reached yet, thus allowing us to satisfy a demand that needs to be completely tapped.
With regard to this point, one of the most important steps when making this kind of decision is to carry out a market research study. First, we need to choose our target markets, usually those that offer the greatest demand, to then analyze prospective clients’ profiles. If a company is already implementing an internationalization plan, it needs to do more than merely wondering which languages its website should be translated into, and consider if it is sufficiently prepared to provide services in such languages and whether it knows everything in relation to exporting to said regions of interest. This is a relevant area since trading conditions between two countries can tell a company a lot about the profitability of the interlanguage efforts.
Regarding this interlanguage effort, is what we do actual translation? Whilst much of the work of adapting a website to a different language consists of translating the textual content between one or more language pairs, the truth is that other aspects of a website must be adapted in order to have the right impact on the “overseas” client, which means that this type of effort is more related to localization. We pay attention to the design of the portals (use of colors, visibility, domains…) and we try to ensure that idiomatic expressions with local connotations reach other markets with the same strength. It may even be necessary to redesign the whole approach for the target audience. All these efforts go beyond translation and are evidence of an imperative need to approach and persuade the client. Therefore, when considering which language to translate a website into, these same factors should be taken into account. The most popular languages for websites are English, followed by German, Russian, Spanish, French and Japanese. As a company, it may be more attractive to translate into the most common languages on the internet.
Website localization is a sensitive process where each step must be carefully thought out. When selecting the most appropriate languages for the internationalization process, we must take into account both the client’s interests and our own horizons.
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