 The first thought that may spring to mind is having translated content on a website. This is absolutely the right place to start but there is more to website translation than you might think.
Translating the content will indeed allow you to communicate with your clients in their own language, thus building the first steps to a good relationship but if the website cannot be found on a local search engine, no one will be able to visit your site to benefit from your language pages.
99% of people who do not have English as their first language will search on search engines in their native language. Search engines then crawl all the sites that have relevant keywords and related phrases throughout their site in their metadata, content and page titles. If you have only translated the content of your page, the chances are that vital local keywords will have been missed and the opportunity to generate traffic as a result has been lost.
Once your new client has found your website, assuming it has been properly optimised for local search engines the next battle is to keep your potential client on your site long enough to engage interest and generate an enquiry or a sale. The most off-putting discovery for a non-English speaker is a poor translation. We have all seen the funny mis-translations around the internet but this is serious business if you have invested money into having a website that will actually speak to people in their own language. If this key factor is not considered then your translated pages may as well not exist.
The solution to this is to localise the text, rather than just translate it word for word. This means making the language version sound as though it were written by a native company to that country, including local phrases, appealing to a particular culture and being sensitive to different associations in different countries. With these factors in mind you will be on a strong footing to secure international trade and emerge from the UK crisis stronger than those who chose to cut back during times of downturn. |