Business website translations: What’s the easiest way?

In this post, we look at how you can translate your business’s website with Weglot’s translation software. With Weglot, you get fast and reliable machine translations, along with a translation management platform where you can easily edit your translations. 

A quick FYI on how accurate machine translation can be: We recently did research to see how accurate machine translation is. The results were overwhelmingly positive, which might help explain why ⅔ of our customers don’t even bother making edits to their translations.

Here are just a few examples of businesses that have used Weglot to translate their site and the positive results they’ve seen after launching their multilingual site. 

• When ToSHARE—a modern street food restaurant—wanted to translate their site, they knew they needed a website translation software; otherwise, they’d be stuck constantly making edits due to their rotating menu. With Weglot’s website translation software, they were able to translate all of their content (including their online booking system) and launch their translated site within just 5 minutes.
  
  Plus, thanks to Weglot’s automatic content detection feature, whenever they update their menu on their original site, Weglot detects it and updates their translated sites automatically. (Read the full case study here.)

• When SmartKeyword—an SEO agency—wanted to make their site multilingual, they knew they had an uphill battle ahead of them. Their site had 150 pages of long-form content, and they wanted this content translated into 3 different languages. This kind of project could have taken months to complete. But SmartKeyword was able to use machine translation to quickly translate their site into 3 languages. Each translated page was automatically given a unique URL (which helps with SEO).
  
  And later when they had more time, SmartKeyword used Weglot’s translation management platform to review and edit parts of their translated content. After launching their translated sites, SmartKeyword saw a 10% increase in traffic in the first month. (Read the full case study here.)

• Volant—an eCommerce store—wanted to translate over 100k words into 9 languages. Without Weglot, this project would have taken months and cost thousands. But with Weglot, Volant’s team was able to launch all 9 translated sites within one month, and at a much more affordable price.
  
  After going multilingual, Volant saw 2.4x increase in online visits and a 39% increase in international revenue.  (Read the full case study here.)

Below, we take a closer look at how these companies (and many more like them) use Weglot to translate their business websites.

Want to translate your site today? Start your free Weglot trial. 

How to Do Business Website Translations the Right Way

In our examples above, we referenced two key aspects of using Weglot.

1. Machine translation. Weglot uses machine translation from leading providers (Google Translate, DeepL, Microsoft Translate, and others). This way, you get the best translation each time, based on the language pair. You can easily add our software to any CMS (from WordPress to Shopify, and much more.). 
   
   Once Weglot is added, it can translate your entire site within minutes. After your initial translation, Weglot will automatically detect and translate any new content, keeping your translated sites up-to-date. Plus, when Weglot translates your site, it follows the best practices Google outlined for multilingual SEO.

2. Weglot’s translation management platform. With Weglot, you can easily access all of your translated content. You can make changes directly to your translated content without having to download or upload any files. You can also order professional translation services through Weglot and set up glossaries that set translation rules (such as whether you want certain URLs kept untranslated or if there are specific words you don’t want Weglot to translate, like brand names). 

How to Translate Your Entire Business’s Website in Minutes 

To start, simply add Weglot to your website. This is incredibly simple, and doesn’t require any sort of coding or development. You can add Weglot to any CMS platform, from WordPress to Shopify to a CMS your team built themselves. This takes care of displaying your multilingual website. 

Here’s a quick video explainer showing the overall process:

Once you’ve added Weglot to your site, pick your original language (the language your site is in currently) and which languages you want to translate your content into.

And that’s it. Weglot will now translate and display your entire site. All of your product pages, blog posts, headers, footers, on-page SEO elements like alt tags and metadata, and everything in between. 

Plus, Weglot will automatically create unique URLs for each translated site. For example, weglot.com is our main site and it’s in English. But our French site can be found at weglot.com/fr/. This subdomain feature is a big plus for SEO (which we cover in more detail at the end of this post). 

All of your content is easily accessible through the Weglot Dashboard, so you don’t need to log into different hosting platforms.

For most sites using Weglot, the entire translation process takes just a few minutes. 

But How Accurate is Machine Translation?

Because Weglot uses a mix of the best machine translation (MT) services available (from DeepL to Google Translate), you’ll always get a solid starting point. And even “complex” or technical content is being translated well by MT. 

For example, one of our customers is Basler AG—and they needed translation software that could accurately translate highly-technical service manuals for industry-grade digital cameras. 

This accuracy explains why ⅔ of our clients don’t end up making any edits to their translated content. Depending on your site or your specific audience, the easiest and most efficient method for your site might just be adding Weglot and using machine translation for your entire project.

But as we said, Weglot is also a translation management platform where you can quickly edit your translations—which about ⅓ of our clients do. 

How to Customize Your Translations with Weglot

Once your site is translated, you can easily access, customize, and edit your translations with Weglot’s translation management platform.

From your dashboard, you can click into a specific translation, and narrow down your search by looking up a specific URL or a specific phrase. 

Once you find the translation you want to edit, you edit it right then and there. You don’t need to download or transfer any content.

You can also view your translations through Weglot’s Visual Editor. 

This gives you a live view of how your translated content fits in with your website’s layout and design. 

What if You Don’t Have Your Own Team of Translators?

Not every business will have translators on payroll. With Weglot, you can pick which content you want to be professionally reviewed and then send it off to translators. 

Once the translator is done with their work, it will be automatically updated and live on your site. No need to juggle a load of files or folders, or navigate dozens of document versions. 

Plus, Weglot Optimizes Your Translated Sites for SEO

Weglot makes sure your translated sites are optimized for SEO.

Specifically, Weglot:

• Automatically translates all of your on-page SEO elements, such as your alt tags and metadata.
• Adds code to your translated site so Google knows it’s available to web users.
• Creates a new subdomain/subdirectory for each translated site. For example, our main site is weglot.com and it’s in English. But our Spanish site is under the subdomain https://weglot.com/es/, where “es” denotes Spanish.

A Quick Recap: How to Translate Your Business’s Website in Minutes

In this post, we looked at several different types of businesses and different kinds of translation projects—from a restaurant with an ever-changing menu to an SEO agency with hundreds of pages of long-form content.

Some projects will only need machine translation, where you can add Weglot to your CMS and translate all of your content within minutes. Other projects will involve your translators (or translators ordered through Weglot) going through and reviewing specific translations. 

Whichever method is right for your business, Weglot has you covered. 

With Weglot, you get:

• Fast and accurate machine translation.
• Automatic content detection, so your translated sites are always up to date.
• Unique subdomains/URLs for each translated site (which is a big win for SEO).
• A translation management platform where your translators can review content—with the option to order professional translation services.

If Weglot sounds like the right tool to translate your business website, start your free trial today.