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When we build multi language websites, the focus is usually on the main parts of our site;  copy, menus, footer, logo, sidebars etc.  But it has been my experience that there are a number of hidden parts to your site that are often overlooked and not translated.

These missed items are jarring and can impact on a site visitors experience if not translated.

In this post I want to give you my top 7 list of things that are often overlooked on a multi language website.

1) 404 Page

This is the page that is shown if a page cannot be found, it is very frustrating if a site visitor is given an error message that they cannot understand.  A confused visitor will not become a customer.

2) Images

If your images contain text, do your site visitors a favour and translate them too.

Common issues I see are call to action sliders with one language through the site. Go that little further and create multiple copies of your images.  I understand this may cost a little more in graphic design fees, but the rewards of new customers from brand new markets should be factored into these costs.

Another thing to think about with your imagery is cultural sensitivity.  One image that may be suitable for one market may not be suitable for another.

An example;  you may have an image of an emergency ambulance, in the west traditionally we use the Red Cross, but in Islamic countries the Red Crescent is the accepted symbol.  I’ll write about cultural sensitivity more in other posts, but be aware one set of images may not be acceptable in other countries.

3) Specialised Scripts

If you have special scripts or plugins running on your site, you may need to ensure they are fully translated.

A great example is a shopping cart script.  Have you been through the entire buying process with the eye of a foreign language customer.  Does you add to cart script translate, is your checkout in the desired language?

If your customer cannot understand the checkout process, the cart will probably be abandoned.

4) Downloads

Are your downloadable media files translated?

I’ve been working with a company to ensure their PDF downloads are available in multiple languages.  They understand it’s not just the website but all their electronic media that needs to be translated.

Does that free gift you offer people as an ethical bribe to join your mailing list have different language versions?  It should.

5) Error Messages

I’ve touched on this already with 404 pages, but are the error messages your site displays in the appropriate language?

Imagine you have a contact form that requires people to add their phone number, if someone submits without adding their phone details, and they see an error message they cannot understand, how do they know what to do?

6) SEO Meta Information

This is a biggie, if we are spending a l0t of time and effort translating your content, why do people not go that extra step and translate their SEO meta information so they can match their content to the searches?

The great people at iCanlocalize.com offer SEO meta data translation services, check out their service page for details.

7) Video

This is often overlooked because of the cost of video production (I hold my hand up and say my video is only in English).

Why not get a new voice over or add subtitles to your videos and create multiple versions to show to people with different languages.

YouTube has a captioning system where you can add subtitles fairly easily.

Wrap Up

It’s the little missing pieces that jar with people when visiting your site.  Missing translations and small errors are the difference between a sale or a cart abandonment, show your site visitors you care.

Do you need a second pair of eyes to review your translated site to find and fix the missing translations? Get a no obligation quote today.

Photo Credit: Di’s Eyes via Compfight cc – A knotted handkerchief, is a method used in the UK to remind you to do something.

I was working on a client site which was built with English and Chinese languages.  The theme they were using showed excerpts of larger blog posts on the home page, it was working fine in English but when we switched over to Chinese we were getting issues.

The Chinese version of the site, instead of showing a Chinese excerpt was showing all of the Chinese content, this is not what we wanted.

What Is An Excerpt

An excerpt is a cut down teaser of your full content, it is often used in a list of content to show what is available on your website.

A site visitor can scan the excerpt and then choose if it is of interest then click through to read the full content.  Instead of filling your homepage with huge blocks of content you can show more digestible chunks.

Why Chinese Excerpts Don’t Work Too Well

The problem is the way WordPress, the software I was using for this build, creates excerpts.  It looks for the first X words and then cuts off the content and creates an excerpt.  By default this is 55 words.

Why is this a problem? WordPress looks for spaces, and often there are very few spaces in Chinese text, so the software does not know how to calculate a word and huge chunks of text are returned.

The Solution

The solution was to count characters rather than words to make an excerpt.

This could be custom coded, but luckily there are plugins out there that can do this for us.

The one I eventually went with was Advanced Excerpt, this allow us to set a character count rather than a word count.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-excerpt/

Here is a screen dump of the settings page we get with Advanced Excerpt.

Click to see full size image

Another very useful function of this plugin is that we can tell it to count character then find the end of the next word which stops the English excerpt begin cut off mid wor… (only joking word of course :)).

Another option that seemed to work (but I struggled to read the Chinese documentation) was this one.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-chinese-excerpt/

Wrap Up

This was a brand new situation to me, and just goes to show that we often take the way languages work for granted.

What works on your website with your native language may not always work when you add an additional language.  The challenges of building multi language websites are not always clear cut.

If you need help with some odd issue on your multi language site like this please contact us for a quote.

There is a famous quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde depending upon the source you use that says:

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

This is of real interest to many people who are building multi territory websites and may be a case for having a multiple language website with two versions of English!

English Is English Surely?

No not really, the way British people and American people use English is slightly different and if you want to sell into both territories it is a very good idea to modify and localise your English copy to match the country.

People are very sensitive to copy and if you are using American style English to sell into a British market the locals will notice and your message may not be received very well.

Spelling

The obvious difference is the way many words are spelled.  There is wide use of the “ize” ending in the US which is very noticeable to a British person who usually goes with “ise”.

The British English grammar police will be up in arms if you “ize” a word, even though it is technically correct,the word can be spelled both ways, they will dramatize the issue to the nth degree believe me I’ve seen it.

Cultural Differences

There are cultural differences, in the UK we don’t like hyperbole but in the US it’s acceptable.

If I had a pound for every time someone from the US said I was awesome for fixing a technical issue I would be rich, but to the British mind, awesome is the scale of the pyramids or the power of the ocean crashing against the shore.

The Technicalities

Using multi language software you can install multiple languages on a website, but different versions of English can also be seen as different language even though they are both English.

We can install the language en-us or en-gb and make them act as different languages, you can then “translate” English to English for your target market.

I had a client that used this very effectively to sell into US, Canadian,British, Australian and New Zealand markets.

It’s Not Just English

You would be wrong to think this is a snooty English thing, the French speaking Canadians and their mother country also have differences, check out this post for details http://www.fluentin3months.com/quebecois/

Wrap Up

English is being homogenised (or is that homogenized) because of the widespread enjoyment of US television in the UK, my kids think everything is awesome, but there is a hardcore of people who don’t like Americanized English in their copy.

Cultural differences between the way countries use English is a very real thing to consider when planning your multi territory website. You need to write copy that resonates with your target market to help make that sale.

If you need help building a multi territory website including multi currency, please visit this page for a no obligation quote.

I run a one man (read person if that term bugs you) multinational business, and we all can, thanks to the levelling effect of the internet.

The Internet Has Brought People Together

The internet has brought people together like no other medium in the past.

I can communicate with people across the planet at almost zero cost.  There are tools that allow me to provide services as if they were sitting next to me, and other tools to take payment in their local currency and deposit it in my bank account with almost no effort. In short the world is my market, I’m a multinational player not a local small business, and I think you should build your empire in the same way so you can tap into a huge global audience not a small sheltered local one.

An Unusual Day

Let me tell you about an unusual day I had last week that sparked the idea for this post.

I came to work in my home office in the UK, and my first task was to catch up with some emails to a client in Australia there is a small window when we are both online so I dealt with them as a priority so we could bat a couple of ideas back and forth about a Chinese version of his site before he turned in for the night.

I took a 10am skype call from a client in Dubai, we had to juggle our times around his visit to the Mosque, but it worked out well, he gave me final instructions for a multilingual site we would be working on together.

I went through my morning routine of sending out quotes to potential clients around the globe. Then I knuckled down and did some real work.  morning is my prime time, it is usually very quiet, but not today.

The majority of my work comes from the US. Early afternoon sees the east coast rise, and my inbox comes to life, I start shooting replies to queries, sending out invoice the usual day to day client interaction. As the afternoon wears on I can feel the rest of the states waking from their slumber, my last client interaction is from a Canadian on the Pacific coast needing help with a bug in her French and English site.

That evening I gave a webinar attended by people in multiple time zones, I always start my webinars by saying “Good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending upon your timezone”.

I love the way my work seems to follow the sun throughout the day.

The Majority of My Clients Are International

The majority of my clients are not local to me in the UK, even though this could be beneficial to me.

I deliberately position myself as an international player. This allows me to tap into a huge global market, not just a local one. I don’t do local networking events (that leaves me cold) I’m  not hunting down local companies so I can physically pitch to them, rather I have a 24/7 website selling my wares to anyone who cares to call. When I run ads I target the english speaking world, where ever they may be.  I can and do service people where ever they may be, the internet has made global trade a very easy thing.

There Are Downsides

Of course it’s not all shiny happy people, there are downsides. Paypal kicks me in the nuts with exchange rates every time I draw down cash (bastards). Timezone limitations. many of which are self impose mean many potentially lucrative 1-1 consulting gigs drift off because I cannot or will not take a call at 10pm. I’ve been at the pointy end of Xenophobia and short sighted people who accept quotes then later come back and say they found someone local.  WTF this goes both ways people, you don’t need to search for mediocre local talent, you can hire from the global community as easily as you can the local community.

Go Global

There is an global audience out there waiting for your products an services, you just need a way to reach them. A multi language website is a great way to start.

 Image by toasty

Photo Credit: Sudhamshu via Compfight cc

Many people think that running their website copy through Google translate is enough to make their website multi-language.

I’m here to tell you that’s not good enough and the resultant copy will be jarring and amateurish to the foreign language reader.

What Is Google Translate

It’s tool you can see at translate.google.com.  You cut and paste your copy into the left hand side, select the output language and voila translated content.

But is it any good?

The Technology Is Too Young

It’s taken us thousands of years to make our language as complex as possible, and it takes us as humans many years to learn the complexity of our own language, developing translation algorithms is in it infancy, Google and Co. have a long way to go before they perfect this technology.

Think about your kids, they are exposed to your native language daily, and we still need to pick them up on problems with the way they speak or write.

I think it will come, but until that day we need human translators not robots.

Computers Don’t Have The Context

A person translating some copy can read it and understand the context.  A robot translator will just see a word and try to pick a matching one from it’s database.  It cannot read and understand the meaning of your content.

Here’s an example, you are selling a feel good spa day, talking about relaxation, luxury, high end accommodation, log fires, intimacy with your partner.

When you read this you are already picking up the emotions, you are imagining the scenario of crackling log fires, the smell of the smoke.

A robot would translate this to be “there will be burning bits of wood in your room, this will give off smoke” that’s not the feeling or context you want to portray.

The Nuance Of Your Message is Lost

If you say one thing in English, simply translating the words into French can lose the nuance.   There are some English phrases with no direct translation into French and vice versa.

A great example of this is the French term L’esprit de l’escalier.  It’s that feeling that you get once you have stormed out of an argument and you think of the perfect riposte to their words about five minutes later.  You kick yourself and wish you had said that thing during the argument.

See it takes a sentence to explain that in English, but just a short phrase in French, there is no way a robot translator can pick up that nuance.

So What’s The Answer

I’m sure the Google translate people will eventually crack the translation algorithm, but I’m 100% sure we will have to have a real person proficient in the language to proof read (and correct) the copy, language is too complex for a computer for the next 10 years as far as I can see.

I use Google translate to find single words, for example menu items, otherwise I always use skilled human translators.  My preferred translator company is iCanLocalize, their team of freelance translators can plug directly into the multi language software I use.

I can select a block of copy and send it out for translation in any number of languages, and a translation is sent back ready to plug directly into the website I am building. No cutting and pasting, just translations straight into my site ready to display.

I’ve been Guilty Too

When I first setup this site, I ran a couple of pages through Google translate to act as holding pages before I passed them out to translation (I may still have some French pages like this, do as I say not do as I do I’m afraid 🙂 )

A native German reader read them and was laughing at some of my turns of phrase, if I remember I think I said I was selling people or something like that.

Wrap Up – Misadventures with Google Translate

Translation is expensive, but it is far better than a mixed message translation as supplied by Google translate.  Check out iCanLocalize and their translation services.

If you are starting 2014 with plans to build your own multi language website, then please let me give you a no obligation quote

Photo Credit: legoalbert via Compfight cc

I was in discussions with a client about building out their multi language website. We were talking about why he wanted to serve up his site in multiple languages and his answer really struck a chord with me and I wanted to share it with you.

The Normal Reasons to Translate

The two usual reasons people translate their sites are.

1) To increase the reach of their sales

By translating your content, it makes it easier to make sales as people can understand the benefits and features in their own language.

2) They have to due to legal requirements

Certain countries force website owners to host their sites in multiple languages, certain Canadian states and UK based government sites have to have a Welsh language option.

I Want To Show We Care – Translate To Show You Care

My clients reason was very different, he told me that most of his clients speak excellent English, but he wanted to:

Show we care enough about them to translate into their language

I’ve filed that away as an example of excellent customer service.  This client is going to the length and expense of translating their site just to show they care for their clients (and potential clients) who have English as a second language.

English is the Lingua Franca of international business, most people speak and read it, but translating into other languages can show you care.

Photo Credit: Gerrit…! via Compfight cc