The Four Stages of Website Translation

It requires the right team or language service vendor, project management, quality management, a robust technology stack, and systems integration. Website translation typically follows a 4-stage approach.

Stage 1 | Strategic Planning

It is crucial to thoroughly plan and prepare the requirements for the project before you start localizing your website. Planning includes:

Conducting Market Research

Identify target markets. This requires you to research the market size, competition, and legal and regulatory requirements.

Defining Target Languages

If you plan to gradually roll out to specific foreign markets one at a time, you can focus on one language pair. Or you can use your website analytics to identify and prioritize your most important foreign markets.

Stage 2 | Project Preparation

Now that you are clear about your vision and target market, it’s time to set up your project:

Organize Your Translation Team

This includes your in-house team and language service provider (LSP). Identify which project manager, linguists, and reviewers should be assigned to the project and obtain any estimated costs. Additionally, ensure all stakeholders are informed of their responsibilities and deadlines to guarantee smooth project execution.

Create a Roadmap

Your plan should be documented to ensure your team and LSP follow the same guidelines to complete the project accurately, on budget, and on time.

Speak to Your Developer Team About Internationalization

If this is a new website, create the content with translation in mind. This includes using simple words and sentences and avoiding cultural references so the content will be easier to adapt.

Adapt Images and Media

Your design team must change photos, images, colors, and videos to localize multimedia content.

Make Your Layout Flexible

Your web developers or user experience team should create or adjust the layout of your website to account for varying text lengths for different languages.

Stage 3 | Project Execution

Implementing your translation project is more straightforward; however, it is the most time-consuming. With your website and all files ready for translation, you should then follow these tasks:

Create a Project Brief

Provide your team with everything they need to know about the project, including specific instructions for each piece of content.

Prepare Translation Resources

Ensuring that your translation resources are well-prepared is critical to maintaining consistency, accuracy, and quality throughout the translation process. These resources are essential tools for your linguists and will significantly impact the effectiveness of your translated content.

Style Guide

A comprehensive style guide provides detailed instructions on how to maintain your brand’s voice and tone across all languages. It includes guidelines on language usage, grammar, punctuation, and stylistic preferences. The style guide ensures that your translations reflect your brand identity consistently, no matter the language. Key elements to include are:

• Voice and Tone: Define the personality of your brand’s communication. Should it be formal or informal? Friendly or professional?
• Grammar and Syntax: Set rules for sentence structure, verb usage, and other grammatical elements to maintain uniformity.
• Punctuation: Provide guidelines on the use of commas, periods, exclamation marks, and other punctuation to avoid confusion.
• Formatting: Include rules for dates, times, numbers, and measurements to align with local conventions.
• Preferred Terminology: Specify terms that should always be used or avoided to keep the messaging clear and on-brand.

Term Base or Glossary

A term base or glossary is a repository of specific terms, phrases, and jargon relevant to your industry and brand. This resource ensures that key terms are translated consistently across all content. Important aspects to consider:

• Brand-Specific Terminology: Include terms unique to your brand, such as product names, service offerings, and proprietary processes.
• Industry Jargon: List industry-specific terms to maintain accuracy and relevance in technical and specialized content.
• Approved Translations: Provide the approved translations for each term to ensure consistency.
• Contextual Examples: Offer examples of how terms should be used within sentences to guide linguists in applying them correctly.

Translation Memory (TM)

Although translation memory is not as critical as the style guide and glossary in marketing, it still plays a significant role in ensuring consistency and efficiency. TM stores previously translated segments of text, which can be reused in future translations. Benefits of a well-maintained TM include:

• Efficiency: Speeds up the translation process by reusing previously translated content.
• Consistency: Ensures that the same phrases are translated uniformly across different projects.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces the amount of new translation needed, saving time and resources.

Cultural References and Localization Notes

These resources provide contextual information and guidelines to help linguists adapt content culturally. This ensures that translations resonate with local audiences and avoid potential cultural missteps.

Key components include:

• Cultural Sensitivities: Highlight any cultural nuances or sensitivities that translators should be aware of.
• Localization Preferences: Specify preferences for local idioms, expressions, and cultural references that align with your target audience.
• Visual Elements: Provide guidelines for adapting images, colors, and design elements to fit cultural expectations.

Legal and Compliance Guidelines

For industries with strict regulatory requirements, such as the Life Sciences industry, it is crucial to provide translators with guidelines on legal and compliance-related content. This ensures that all translations meet local regulations and avoid legal issues. Important considerations include:

• Regulatory Terms: List any regulatory terms that must be used in specific ways.
• Compliance Standards: Provide information on local laws and regulations that impact content translation.
• Approval Processes: Outline the steps for reviewing and approving translations to ensure compliance.

By thoroughly preparing these translation resources, you equip your linguists with the tools they need to produce high-quality, consistent translations that align with your brand’s voice and meet local cultural and regulatory requirements. This foundational work will significantly enhance the effectiveness of your website translation and contribute to your global success.

Get The Right Tech Stack

Your company or LSP must have all the software and tools to streamline and automate the translation project. This could include a translation management system (TMS) to manage the project, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, machine translation (MT), and AI tools.

Accelerate with AI: Integrate With Your Systems

Instead of sending translation files manually by email, another approach is to leverage AI and connect directly to your marketing tools with a tool such as OPAL-Marketing, an AI-powered solution for creating global marketing campaigns.

OPAL-Marketing allows you to swiftly and effortlessly translate global content across various content types directly from your work surfaces. By simply launching OPAL-Marketing within your current marketing tools, you can harness the capabilities of AI-enabled translations for increased efficiency.

Stage 4 | Post-Translation

In this phase, your reviewers analyze your translated content, and testers check the user interface (UI) and user experience. Checking your translated content in context is also a great way to ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of the translations within the actual product environment. This step helps to catch issues that might not be apparent in isolated text, such as layout problems, cultural nuances, and overall usability.

Conduct Multiple Quality Control (QC) Checks

Your reviewers should run QC checks at critical points in your project timeline. This includes ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural appropriateness, and brand voice consistency.

Run Functional User Tests

Aside from reviewing the translated content, you also need to do international user testing to ensure the website functions as intended, with navigation, buttons, online forms, and shopping carts working as they should, even after translation.