Media Translation: How to Translate Your Website Images

If you’re localizing your website and in particular focusing on the content translation stage, it’s important to remember that there’s more to website translation than just the words on your site. 

Yep, that’s right – images, videos, PDFs, and other documentation play a key role in creating a truly localized experience for the people visiting your website. 

In fact, not translating this type of “content” can send the wrong message to potential customers in your new target markets. Unfortunately, this is often perceived as your company not being as invested in providing each customer with the same website experience, instead favoring those in your original language. 

So, let’s take a look at why media translation is so important, our advice for getting it right, and ultimately how you can achieve it with Weglot as your website translation tool.

Why Translate Your Media Content?

Media translation matters because untranslated images, videos, and PDFs leave part of your site in its original language. Personalization is what closes that gap. In fact, Econsultancy found that 93% of companies see an increase in conversion rates from personalization.

When you want to engage with new audiences, sell products or services, and raise brand awareness – translating the entirety of your website, down to imagery and video content can help achieve that. 

Translating the words on your website is step one. With this, your website visitors will be able to fully understand what it is you do or offer. Following this, the next step is to complete the translation process with localized images, replacement videos and PDF documents. 

Do You Need Media Translation?

In short, the answer is yes. In the same way that you translate your text so that foreign audiences can understand, the same goes for imagery and video content. For example, on your site’s landing page, you may have an explanatory video that shows what your product or service is, and how it works. Of course, if you’re catering to English, French, German, and Spanish-speaking markets, it makes sense to have a different language version of this video appear corresponding to the language the visitor is viewing the page in. 

Another reason why you may wish to translate media on your site is to be sensitive and appreciative of cultural nuances. For example, say you’re a global department store operating stores in the Western world and the Middle East.

Perhaps you’re displaying some holiday content on your site for what is considered Christmas by many in the Western world. But, for regions where Christmas isn’t generally celebrated, it is advisable to adapt any content such as this to the audience you are targeting. It shows that you’re in touch with your customer base and care about delivering a highly personalized experience.

Image Translation Best Practices

When it comes to translating your images, there are a number of factors that you’ll need to consider to ensure you’re following best practice recommendations: 

The file itself: If you’re using different, or altered versions of an image for a particular language version of your site, you can start by using a different image URL for each version. Following from this, it’s good practice to localize the filename for image SEO purposes.

Text on an image: If you’ve got text on the image itself, it’s imperative that you translate this so that target audiences can understand. Translatable SVG files greatly facilitate this process. 

Image alt-text: Metadata plays a hugely significant role when it comes to SEO, and for images this is no exception. By translating this metadata you’ll be increasing accessibility to your content.

‍Image link: Say, for example, you have an image on your site linking back to another page on your site. This link should be changed based on the language used by visitors to optimize UX.

Translating Your Media With Weglot

With media translation not only being a key aspect of personalization for your customers but also positively impacting multilingual SEO, it’s important to use a translation solution that is equipped to translate components beyond text. This includes keywords – here’s a video summarizing how to do just that:

Fortunately, when using Weglot as your translation solution, you’ll find that it easily facilitates all your media translation needs. 

How to Translate Media via the Weglot Dashboard

1. Open the Translations tab and select the language pair you want to edit.
2. Select the relevant strings, click Actions, then choose Add media translation.
3. In the pop-up, paste the original media file URL. To find it, right-click the image and inspect its source.
4. Upload the replacement image through your website CMS’s media manager. Paste the new file’s URL into the second field, then click Add.
5. Filter the Translations list by Media to confirm that the replacement image appears in the selected language.
6. To check SEO-related text, filter the list by Meta (SEO). Find the image’s alt text and verify that its translation is accurate; Weglot translates alt text automatically, but reviewing it helps ensure the image is fully optimized for SEO.

How to Translate Media via the Visual Editor Tool

1. Open Translations in the Weglot dashboard, then click Visual Editor.
2. Click Start Editing to open a live preview of your website.
3. Find the highlighted image you want to translate and click the pencil icon in its top-right corner. The image must already be included in your Translations list.
4. Replace the existing URL with the URL of the translated image.
5. Click OK to save the image translation automatically. Then use the website’s language switcher to view the translated version and check how the new image appears live.

You can also update the image’s alt text through the Visual Editor using the same highlighted-element editing process.

Note: While we’ve only shown you examples of how to translate images in this article, the same method applies to videos and other media types. Following the same technique, this can be achieved either through the use of the translations list or via the visual editor.

Conclusion

Businesses operating across borders are now competing against each other more intensely than ever. With little to distinguish commercial offerings, it’s those businesses that go the extra mile who are rewarded. Media translation is a hugely important, but often overlooked, aspect of international business today, serving a dual benefit.

On a practical level, media translation can help your SEO efforts and bring about more traffic and consequential sales. However, on a more customer-centric level, media translation sends a message to your international customers that you care about them and want to offer a personalized consumer experience. 

Fortunately, media translation has never been more accessible or simple thanks to intuitive translation and localization solutions like Weglot.

Ready to do it on your own site? See how Weglot’s image translation can translate your website images automatically. Or why not try out Weglot’s 14-day free trial and see for yourself how easy media translation can be.