The reputation and impact of your website closely rely on the content that describes you and your business. That is why businesses are now spending a good amount on quality content. Having good quality content can help you a great way. However, you still need some more efforts to get the cutting edge over your competitors especially if you want to make a global reach. Even your best quality content fails to bring in the desired results if it is not understood by the audience of foreign countries where English is not spoken or understood widely. For that purpose, you need to think seriously about translating your content into different languages. Here is a simple, streamlined way to translate your website in order to increase your global reach and impact:

Recognize the need for translation

In order to get the maximum RoI on the resource input into translating content, you should first find the different geographical regions from where you are getting the traffic. It will help you to keep your efforts focused and result-oriented. After all, translating your website into German might not be a good choice if you are getting Zero or next to nil traffic from Germany!

Google analytics is the authoritative source to find the traffic details and checking the countries where your site is accessed thus helping you to take a wise decision.

Streamline the process

In the first phase start tentatively. From the RoI point of view, it is recommendable to translate your site only for the countries from where you are getting substantial traffic. The idea is to increase the traffic from such countries.

Instead of translating your entire site in the one go, you should take a measured, streamlined approach, identify the specific pages of your website or the blogs that are inviting most of the traffic and translate them.

Similarly translating the most viral blog posts also makes a sense. They are already viral and translating them would even attract more traffic.

You can also consider translating the content that can trigger the potential buyers to buy your products or services like discount and offer page, new product arrivals or last hour sale! The idea is to start translating the pages that are more likely to help directly in conversions.

Should you use Plug-ins to translate your content?

Using plug-ins is seemingly the best way available but it has its own limitations. The content is not necessarily translated in the way that it makes any sense to the audience. Such content can actually drive away the audience instead of attracting.

Poor grammar, muddled phrases and illogical sentences are some of the drawbacks of using the plug-ins for translation. That is not to say that these flaws come built-in with every plug-in but you can never be fully dependent on them. Many of the premium plug-ins also lack consistency in performance and you never know if they goof up at the decisive juncture.

Besides such plug-ins can even interfere with your overall site structure and negatively influence the SEO. For instance while they can translate your page, many plug-ins just don’t translate your Meta tags, title tags and image tags that creates a disconnection between your page content and the Meta description thus negatively influencing your SEO.

Besides, there are other details regarding the content that you just cannot ignore. Translating proverbs, analogies and other culture-specific contexts requires more than just word for word translation. A proverb that is popular in one country might sound awkward in another because of the cultural differences. So, many times you may fail to achieve the desired results when you use the plug-in for translating your website content.

Get the benefit of human creativity

In order to give your content a human touch and render the similar creativity that matches the original content you can seriously think about hiring third-party services. You may need to invest some time here in order to identify the reliable service providers available at the reasonable prices. However, the benefits it promises surpasses the efforts it requires. It is never a bad thing to invest a few efforts to gain the better results.

While there are many sites that allow you to hire freelancer translators, you need to be very judicious as many such translators might work mechanically- Let’s-finish-it-fast-and-grab-another-project! You may also get the real gems on such platforms but then you need to have the judgment skills.

How to hire?

It is always better to check the portfolio, client testimonials, qualifications and experience of the candidate before recruiting him or her. Better still, you can first give a sample assignment to check the proficiency of the candidate before hiring them for the complete project.