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Website localization and internationalization

Website localization and internationalization

Even though nodoby knows exactly how many billions of sites there exists on the Internet, it can be said that this technology grows exponentially and it is foreseen to go on growing. It is believed that by 2020 there will be 2,5 million smartphones and that consumer behaviour will be different. This poses many opportunities and many challenges to digital marketing. The trend involves creating quality and relevant as well as well designed. 

Websites, blogs, e-commerce, electronic businesses, photos, videos, relevant content, attractive design. What other ingredient lacks this recipe? Of course, in a globalized world there is not only one language. We forget the bilingual, trilingual or multilingual content. Therefore, if the site is supposed to be well designed it should be well translated. 

Like any other translation process, website localization does not only imply converting the text from one language to the other. It is necessary to handle certain concepts and tools; moreover, it is necessary to transmit the same brand image and adapt to some extent the meta language to the target language in terms of culture, customs, etc.

In order to translate a website we also need to handle cat tools like Trados or Wordfast and we should know the different type of websites. For example, some sites are developed in HTML, CSS or PHP with Adobe Dreamweaver while other are created using a CMS (Content Manager System) like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. For the final user, the advantage of CMS templates over HTML developments is the time to modify them. 

Something else we should know when translating is that tags within the code cannot be modified, however, it is important to take into account the translation of metadescription and keywords. If we are working with a multilingual site, the tag hreflag becomes of vital importance since with its implementation; we are able to give relevant information to the tracking robots, showing with this tag the available languages.

Finally, we should put and adapt a menu or language selector to the website so the the user can choose between the different languages. 

 

These is the backstage of website localization from the moment the client asks for the translation to the moment he receives the website perfectly translated and ready to work in another language.

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