Content Translation: How to Implement It Into Your International Marketing Strategy

Content is one of the most effective ways to turn a mildly interested prospect into an enthusiastic customer. When you provide informative, educational articles that emotionally compel your audience and make them feel understood, you know you’ve got engaging content that works.

But it’s entirely different when they can’t understand the language of your content.

It’s no secret that English is the most popular language for online content, taking up almost 52% of all websites. But you may be surprised to learn that after Spanish (making up 5.5%), German is the third most popular language at 4.8%. 

These numbers may seem small…until you realize that 40% of people won’t even buy from a business if their website isn’t available in their native language, making the possibility of a conversion low.

That’s one of the many reasons content translation is crucial. If you want to expand your reach to foreign audiences, they’ll need to understand what you’re offering. 

Though a bulk of them probably speak English, 65% still prefer content in their language, even if it’s of poor quality. So the best way to convince them to buy from you is to, quite literally, speak their language!

What is Content Translation?

Content translation, or marketing translation, is much more than simply converting the text into another language. It’s attuning your content to a specific audience that speaks a different language or is located in another geographical area. 

In other words, it means retaining its impact in the original language and ensuring that it continues to compel your foreign audiences in their language.

That said, content translation must be part of your international marketing strategy. After all, your goal is to reproduce your impact in your original markets across your new target markets. 

But that doesn’t mean you can approach it haphazardly. Doing content translation the right way will set you up for success and ensure that your target audience knows just how valuable your business is to what they’re looking for.  

Why is Content Translation Important?

When 72.1% of consumers spend most of their time on websites in their language, that’s a good sign to invest in content translation services—especially if you’re an ecommerce business. The more users can understand your website in their native language, the higher the chance they’ll engage with you—and ultimately convert.

Content translation is part of your content marketing initiatives. It’s a reliable way of connecting with your target audience and ensuring that they know what you offer.

Much more goes into drawing customers to your business—and keeping them—than great offers and attractive websites. You want them to stick around even after they marvel at your website design or purchase from you. The best way to do this? Through quality content.

After all, content is what tells your target market that you’re an authority in your field, that you’re trustworthy, and that you have a high-quality product or service that exactly meets their needs. 

Another reason content translation is beneficial is because you’ll be making your content much more accessible. By having it available in your target audience’s native languages, you’ll immediately expand your reach. When users don’t have to think so hard about what they’re reading—even if the translation isn’t completely accurate—they’re more likely to engage with you. 

Then, the next step would be to localize your content, which factors in the context and cultural references of your audience.

By investing in content translation, you’ll also benefit from international SEO. Search engines will boost your content, algorithms will amplify your social media reach, and your growing presence means your customers will refer you to their network. And what beats word-of-mouth marketing?

Key Considerations of Content Translation

The mere act of translating your content won’t bring you immediate results; you’ll still need to make sure that you’ve optimized your website’s messages and user experience. 

Here are some things to keep in mind to ensure your content translation project is a success:

Understand Your Target Markets

Identifying your target audience and recognizing what they need is a vital part of the content translation process. It’s not enough to simply translate the content you’ve produced into your original language; each audience in any country has different standards for what they deem interesting and useful. 

One way to do this is to use data. What does market research say about your target audience? Do you have contacts or people on the ground who could give you valuable insight into what your prospective audience would want? What are they interested in?

When you’ve gathered enough information, use it to modify or adjust your translated content, which is another crucial process called localization. Spoiler alert: you’ll need both to effectively reach your international users!

Outline Priorities and Objectives

First, draw the big picture: 

• What results do you want to see by translating your content into different languages? 
• What are your translation needs? 
• What are your target languages? 

It’s difficult to get a jump start on things when you aren’t sure why you’re doing them in the first place!

Then, to make this big undertaking more feasible, slice them into more digestible chunks, like quarterly goals. Review the high-traffic content you’ll need to translate to move closer to your desired objective. 

One measure to consider is choosing between cost and reward. It might not make sense to translate every single page on your website right away, so choose which portions to translate and see the results from there. 

A quick way to do this is to determine which content to prioritize, like your highest-performing articles, main pages, and highest-converting landing pages. 

Establish Your Process and Team

Once you’ve figured out the content to translate, the next step is to outline the actual translation process and the team responsible for overseeing it. 

You can choose between three methods: 

• Human translation, which will be done by professionals
• Machine translation done purely by neural machine translation tools like Google Translate and DeepL 
• Or a mix of both

In fact, Weglot and DeepL discussed how machine translation has advanced into being a solid asset for any marketer looking to expand globally and what MT strategies can help optimize your translation process and bring better results.

If your website is decked out with blog articles, landing pages, support documentation, and many other kinds of pages, the whole process can seem completely daunting. 

Then, you’ll have to figure out your timelines. How soon do you want your content to go live? Do you want to stagger them or release them all at once?

The good news is that a website translation solution like Weglot automatically detects, scans, and then translates all your website content for you—even dynamic content. Companies like Polaar have saved more than 100 hours in translation alone just by using Weglot!

Account for International SEO

There may be an obvious need for your product or service in your home market. But it would be unwise to assume the same across the board—otherwise, you wouldn’t be selling to anyone.

People use different keywords in different countries—even when they speak the same language. For instance, users in the UK would use “trousers” to search for what users in the US would call “pants”. You can quickly see how not localizing can cause you to go viral for the wrong reasons.

That’s why it’s necessary to do some keyword research. Though translating your keywords can sometimes work, it’s not something you should rely on 100% of the time. That way, you understand exactly what people are looking for and ensure your content comes up first.

Adapt Your Website for Multilingual Design

Another important consideration to make when translating your content is to optimize your website to accommodate multilingual design. 

What do we mean by this? Well, for starters, there’s something called text expansion and contraction. Written languages have different lengths; for instance, the English word “shell” would be “coquillage” in French, containing twice as many letters. 

On the other hand, languages like Chinese and Japanese use much fewer characters to convey the same word. That’ll significantly affect how your content fits into your website layout!

Not only that, but you’ll also have to account for right-to-left languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu. Without integrating multilingual design into your website, converting left-to-right text into right-to-left would render your design clunky and inelegant. 

With that said, it’s a good idea to ensure your website is set up to automatically accommodate different languages. That way, it’ll seamlessly switch between languages and retain its original, attractive design and appeal to your global audience.

Find Software That’s Compatible With Both Your Content Translation Efforts and Your CMS

There’s no need to start from scratch and create a whole new workflow just to oversee your content translations—that will only add unnecessary delays when launching in new markets. 

Instead, use a website translation solution that works with whatever CMS or CRM you already use. The right translation software to use will make it easy to translate and manage your translations and provide the level of automation needed for a large-scale translation project.

What Not to Do With Content Translation

Content translation is pretty straightforward. But there are still many things to keep in mind so that you get it right the first time. Here are some things to avoid when translating your content:

• Using the wrong tools: The goal is to use something that streamlines the process and makes content translation more accessible and efficient. The wrong tools—like software that doesn’t already work with your existing CMS—will significantly delay your process, interrupt your workflow, and cause your project to fail.
• Relying on poor-quality translations: Although we mentioned earlier that people would rather read content in their native language, even at the cost of quality and accuracy, not making an effort to offer well-translated, quality content will tell your new audience you don’t care about them or their needs.
• Proceeding without a solid localization strategy in place: Translation and localization go hand in hand when trying to reach a new audience. Having one without the other would be a waste of time.
• Not having clear goals: Objectives guide you, particularly when confused about what to do next. Going about content translation aimlessly will hurt the quality of your translated website and in turn, your reputation with your new audience.

How Weglot Simplifies Content Translation

Staying on top of the different stages of content translation can be complicated. But the good news is that Weglot, a leading website translation solution, can simplify most of the process for you.

For starters, it’s compatible with all content management systems—you won’t have to start from scratch or find a different service provider with your new content translation project.

Since Weglot automatically detects, scans, and then translates your content for you, there’s limited manual work involved. No need to worry about content types—it even translates dynamic content! That makes it even easier to plan and launch your multilingual content marketing strategy.

After it supplies a first layer of machine translation, you can use Weglot’s Dashboard to review the translations and make edits as you see fit. Its translation management system is simple and intuitive, with basically no learning curve.

Thanks to its translation memory, it also remembers your manual translations and applies them throughout your website. If there are some words you don’t want translated, you can easily exclude them from your translation list.

Even better, you can edit your translations in context with Weglot’s Visual Editor. It allows you to make direct changes to a live preview of your website, eliminating the need to dig through code. 

You can also add multiple team members to your project—marketing managers, in-house or outsourced translators, you name it—so that they can review the output and fine-tune it according to your localization strategy. With different levels of permissions, such as ‘manager’ and ‘translator’ you can choose what part of your project can be edited and by whom. 

If you want professional translations done, you can place an order straight from your dashboard. These will then be live in 24-48 hours.

Plus, Weglot automatically takes care of indispensable aspects of multilingual SEO for you. It instantly adds hreflang attributes to each translated version of your website, signaling to search engines which one to show to a specific audience based on their location or even browser settings. 

Leveraging the Potential of Content Translation

Content translation can be a tedious task when you don’t know where to begin. But by understanding its benefits, establishing your goals, setting a clear strategy, and using the right translation tools, having multilingual content will help turn you from a local hero into an international superstar.

Weglot can translate and display your translated website in minutes. With instant translation, full editing capabilities, multilingual SEO setup, and more discover our pricing and try Weglot’s 10-day free trial, commitment-free.