2020-05-19
WEBSITE TRANSLATION… NOW WHAT?The big question is: where is your target audience? More than half of the world’s population is connected to the Internet, and the numbers just keep rising. There are more than 1.5 billion websites in existence, so what can you do specifically for your target audience to find yours? “My target audience is Italian students” – from this sentence, for example, one assumes you want to translate your website into Italian. But have you ever thought about which language your target audience actually prefers? In northern Italy, German is the native language of half a million inhabitants in the region of South Tyrol. What if they are Italian students who prefer to read in German, or Swiss students from the Italian cantons? Consequently, the internationalization of your business cannot be limited to a mere translation of online content. Success in the digital world means adapting your communication to the target audience’s culture and lifestyle. Even things that seem simple, like dates, can mean different things. For instance: 02-09-2021 means 2 September in Portugal, but 9 February in the United States. |
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Your goal should be to make the consumer feel at home when accessing your website: arriving, sitting down on the couch, turning on the TV, watching a movie and feeling satisfied. |
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To achieve this comfort, one must not forget that the right keys are needed to enter the home. The same holds true for your website: if you don’t care about using the right words, no one will come in. This means optimizing your website with specific terms which matter to your target audience (SEO), i.e. using the same words at your website which your target audience types into Google searches. |
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And now, you’re relaxed on the couch, but the TV remote is broken? You click on 4 and it goes to channel 9, you push S+ and the sound goes down. |
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At a website, it is equally annoying to click on “Home” and go to the “Blog” page, or suddenly see an image in another language while reading an interesting article. Fortunately, these small bugs which undermine the visitor’s experience can be avoided. Provide access to an offline version of your website to a translation agency, so that a native speaker of the language can check whether all of the links work and that all of the content is in the right place, or even review and fix any formatting errors that might appear after the translation. Linguistic and functional debugging is a key step in ensuring that nothing has slipped past you, and that your target audience feels right at home when browsing your website. |
