In today's global economy companies realize the power of the internet, operating several websites in order to advance and promote their products and services. All companies, big and small, want to be internationally recognized, and so, invest a portion of their budgets to online and and offline marketing. At the same time, companies often neglect, or forget, about the advantages of international marketing.
Why do we forget that one-third of all internet users do not speak English, and thus our many growing businesses are missing out on a mass potential of clients (as well as potential business partners).
In today's global economy having a multilingual website has become a necessity rather than a luxury in order to become successful in international business.
Let's take a look at a few reasons why your business might benefit by operating a business website translated into multiple languages, and how doing so might help your business strategy on a global scale.
SEO Marketing: Multilingual websites allow you to enter new markets. Local language search engines will index your site and give you new links from within this market area. In most non-English speaking countries, regional search engines in their native language play a much greater role than English-speaking Google, Yahoo and Bing. Hence, you gain better positions, more new visitors to your site (i.e. more potential customers) and more sales.
Company Image: Multilingual sites create an image of a serious and respectable international business, and will win over visitors from companies who have not made this effort.
Customer oriented approach: It allows your visitors to surf quickly and efficiently in their own language. This gives your company and products an advantage over your less prepared competitors.
Now you clearly understand that website translation can be a great help in attracting the foreign public to your business. However, it has to be done in such a way that people will end up buying your service or product.
To have a website translated means much more than getting mere text translated from language A to language B. Indeed, there are numerous factors that must be taken into consideration. And, in fact, it is more correctly to speak about website localization, when you want your business website to work properly in the market of your target countries.
Localization is defined as modifying a product to make it usable and suitable to a target market. First of all, it implies culturally-tuned translation. A culturally-tuned translation makes the reader feel as if the content was not translated, but originally written in the target language. It takes into consideration the culture, style, and language of the target audience.
Using machine translation for this purpose is not a good idea. The decision to have your site translated by a human being, preferably a native speaker, familiar with the culture, terminology, and sayings of the target language is an ideal one.
Moreover, website localization takes into account the appearance of your web pages. Are there pictures, colors or images that would cause offense? A good website translation company will analyze your site and offer you a cultural applicability consultation.
Even more, decent website translators will offer post-sales services that assist in helping you with the small changes in the future. Some translation companies will even provide you with internet marketing services to help your site achieve high visibility in the target country.
If you are serious about promoting your business to international markets, Concordis Language Services can provide your company with these services and help your business grow.
For more information about our Business Translation Services or about our SEO Translation Services, Contact us to discuss how we can help your business grow.