Why Ecommerce Website Translation is Easier Than You Think

Translating your ecommerce site into another language will help you expand your business into new markets. But how do you go about translating your content to appeal to your international customers?

If you’ve never done it before, your first instinct would probably be to outsource the task to an ecommerce website translation agency.

While they use professional translators to convert your content into your target languages, they do come with their drawbacks. They can be expensive, especially if you have a large volume of content and a less common destination language.

Plus, it’ll take weeks or even months to complete the translation project as they have to translate the content manually. Not to mention all the new content and updates you’ll be making—they’ll have to translate that, too! All that will slow down your engagement and conversion with your foreign audiences.

That’s why using translation software is going to be a better option for your ecommerce store. In fact, it’s possible for you or your team to oversee the translation process of your entire ecommerce website (including the product listings) yourselves. All without racking up translation costs.

Let’s get into it.

Note: Weglot is an ecommerce website translation software that can translate your website into over 110+ languages. Weglot has both automatic machine translations (for speed) and manual translation services (for when you want the human touch).

What Ecommerce Websites Need From a Translation Service

Generally speaking, here’s what your ecommerce company will need from a website translation platform:

• Fast translations: The faster you can turn your online store into a multilingual website, the faster you can start selling products to your new audience. Software excels here because it lets you do machine translations. This means you can get your ecommerce site translated in minutes, rather than weeks or months and vastly improve the user experience of your customer base. ‍
• High level of customizations: Each multilingual ecommerce site will need different things, from the pages that should be translated to the specific quality level of each translation and how many new languages they need to translate into. That requires translation technology with several features that translation agencies can’t offer.‍
• Implementation (i.e. uploads): You don’t just want your website content translated, you want it translated and put live on your site. ‍
• Ongoing additions/changes: You may want to update the copy on your product descriptions, translate user reviews, experiment with split-testing different landing pages, or add new products to your ecommerce store. This means you’ll need new content translated down the line, or you may want to go back and change previously translated content.‍
• Multilingual SEO: You want to make sure the new translated version of your site is optimized for search engines. That way, the right audience in that language will find your ecommerce store when looking for products in their native language.

When you use an ecommerce website translation solution that’s capable of all these features, translating and localizing your site becomes a much simpler task you can do yourself.

To see how easy, affordable, and customizable it is to translate your ecommerce site with software, start your 10-day free trial with Weglot today.

How You Can Quickly and Accurately Translate Your Ecommerce Website With Software

Weglot is translation software that works with any ecommerce platform: Shopify (and Shopify Plus), BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento… you name it. You can use Weglot to quickly and accurately translate your ecommerce content and skip the hassle of using an agency.

Here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to set up Weglot on your site:

There are 4 key things that make Weglot a great solution for translating your website:

• A website that’s translated in minutes, not days or weeks. Weglot uses automatic neural machine translation from leading providers like DeepL and Google Translate to translate your content quickly and as accurately as possible. Plus, whenever you add content to your original site, Weglot will automatically detect, translate, and update your translated websites.‍
• Translations you can edit. With Weglot, you can easily make edits to any of your translated copy on your live site (so any changes you make are automatically updated on your site). If you don’t have your own translation team, you can outsource the job to professional translators directly through your Weglot account, making your workflow effortless. ‍Plus, with translation memory built into the product, benefit from the same phrases and taglines always being translated the same way.
• Localization options. When serving a global market, it’s crucial to ensure you tailor your online store to the context of your audience, whether in Spain, China, or Germany. All to provide a top-tier customer experience and improve conversion rates. Weglot makes ecommerce localization simple through various collaboration and translation management tools, allowing you to implement your localization strategy flawlessly.
• Advanced multilingual SEO features. Weglot won’t just translate your ecommerce website, it’ll also make sure your new site is optimized for SEO to help it rank in its new language.

The Perfect Combination of Machine Translation and Human Translation

Pure human translation undoubtedly gives you the most accurate results. But it’s also expensive and time-consuming.

So, we recommend a faster and more practical method: translate your site with machine translation. Then, you can use human translators (also through Weglot if you want) as and when you need them.  

Machine translation is perfect for ecommerce stores that are constantly updating their product catalogs. When you add new content or products to your store, Weglot automatically translates it. This was a big win for Volant, a Norwegian ecommerce business that has websites in 11 languages, including French, English, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, and several more.

Since using Weglot, they’ve seen a 2.4x increase in online visits. Their revenue from international markets had also jumped 39%.

They need to make regular updates across all language versions of their website, and Weglot lets them easily update and translate their 100k word website in multiple languages.

How? Weglot automatically detects new content on their original English site, and then updates all of their translated sites. A seamless translation experience for them and an improved online shopping experience for their international customers. Easy.

To get started with Weglot, simply pick your source language (i.e. the language your site is currently in) and then pick which language you want it translated into. You can translate into as many languages as you need. We have over 110 different language options, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Urdu, and custom languages.

Bonus Feature: Get Professional Translation Services Through Weglot

Sometimes, you’ll want a professional translator to review parts of your ecommerce site. When you do, you can easily order professional translation services through Weglot.

This is still much more affordable and faster than using an agency because you don’t need to track down a translator on your own. Plus, when the translations are ready, they’re automatically updated on your site in 24-48 hours. This cuts out a lot of manual work.

Optimize Your Translated Website for SEO

It’s not just your content you need to translate, but your on-page SEO, too. These include alt tags, meta descriptions, and meta titles. If you outsource your translation, you’ll have to remember to send all that, too.

But that’s just one small part of optimizing your translated site for SEO. It’s not enough for a significant boost in rankings in your different locations.

With Weglot, we have built-in SEO functionality that will help your ecommerce website rank in its new language. For example:

• We automatically create unique URLs for each translated version of your ecommerce site. These are called subdomains or subdirectories. For example, weglot.com is our English site, while weglot.com/de/ is our German site. You (and search engines) can tell it's German by the “DE” in the URL. This helps your German-speaking customers know they’re in the right place, and it also tells the search engines that your translated site is meant for German speakers.

• We add tags in your source code that tell Google you have other different translated versions of your site. When Google looks at your site, it’ll see code that tells it you also have other translated versions of your store. This helps Google recommend your site to the right people based on search queries.

By helping your site with SEO, Weglot increases the likelihood that your translated site will reach a wider audience online.

Just take a look at The Bradery, a French ecommerce website that uses Weglot to translate over 500 new products each day. Speed was of utmost priority to translate such a large volume of content each day, and doing all of it manually was simply out of the question.

They saved hundreds of hours by translating their site with Weglot. The English translations were high-quality enough to leave alone, but as the Spanish market was a key one for the company, they had their small Spain-based team take advantage of Weglot’s post-editing features.

After Polaar, another French ecommerce company, translated their site into 2 languages with Weglot, their organic US traffic doubled. The speed and automation that Weglot gave them definitely amplified their online presence—it was precious time saved that translated into higher visibility.

For example, one of our customers is Ron Dorff, a French-Swedish sportswear brand. They used Weglot to translate their French site into German and English. Since translating their huge catalog of 150 products, they’ve seen a 70% increase in international sales. And a lot of that traffic is coming from search engines.

Because Ron Dorff used Weglot to translate their site, they get the right kind of multilingual visibility. So, when a French-speaking customer searches “Ron Dorff Dad t-shirt” in Google, they automatically get taken to the French site, while a German-speaking visitor will get sent to the German site.

Next Steps: Translate Your Ecommerce Website with Weglot (Free Trial)

For fast-moving ecommerce sites looking to grow, time is of the essence. And with Weglot, you don’t have to sacrifice quality for speed—you can have both.

When you use Weglot to handle your ecommerce translation, you get:

• Fast, high-quality machine translations. You can translate your ecommerce site into multiple languages within minutes.‍
• Translations you can edit. You can manually edit your translations, either with your own team or with professional translators sourced through Weglot.‍
• SEO features for your newly-translated site. Weglot’s multilingual SEO features will help your translated sites rank in the right search engine and in front of potential customers.
• Lower translation costs. Weglot uses DeepL, Microsoft Translator, and Google Translate to provide a first layer of automatic translation. That eliminates the need to outsource your entire translation project to a professional or an agency, which could quickly become expensive. On the other hand, you can also order professional translations from the Weglot Dashboard for sentences and pages that definitely need a human touch.
• Customer support. Weglot has been translating websites since 2016, and we’ve built a dedicated support team to handle any technical questions and queries.

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