In today’s business, translation costs are unavoidable. Your business needs a continuous and consistent global voice. Also, it is about finding the right balance between what your target audience needs and what you can afford to give them. Your business needs to make sure your target audience is fed with high-quality content. Here are a few tips for keeping your budget on point and running a successful website translation project.

#1. Analyze first and select the right languages for targeted website translation

Before using a TMS like Wordbee or approaching a service provider, you need to sort through your web traffic and then you need to select the languages to localize accordingly. With the help of those stats, web analysts are able to find the linguistic regions where the bulk of your international online traffic originates from.

If 40% of your web traffic comes from German-speaking countries, German language would be a good start to budget transactions for. Now if only 2% of your online traffic comes from French-speaking regions, you might consider leaving french localization from your website translation project.

On the other hand, if your business wants to increase its presence in Spanish-speaking countries for other business or market reasons, you might actually want to invest more in Spanish website translation. Think of your website traffic and your future business goals surgically and strategically.

#2. Use a web-based translation management system

Using a translation management system is a key factor in successful expansion in other markets. A translation management system can help you translate your website content within minutes with the help of machine translation systems (Deepl, Google, Microsoft) without losing translation quality. The human translator will edit then machine-translated content using the translation management system to make it 100% high-quality text.

Benefits of using Wordbee Translator for your website translation are:

• All in one solution: Wordbee Translator is a comprehensive translation management platform that does a lot more than help with translations. With Wordbee Translator, you can manage translation suppliers, pricelists, invoices, translation memories. When you use Wordbee Translatorm you not only get a platform to translate content, you can also manage your content on it, communicate with translators, and automate the process of localizing your website.
• Reduce budget and save time. If you’re to hire professional translation services from the start, they will take time to get you the first draft and you also have to pay them for that. You might also be locked-in with that provider. Setting up your own processes for translation and connecting a system like Wordbee directly to your site might take a bit more time at first, but you’ll not regret the savings!
• The platform also has a translation memory which saves all content edited and translated by a human translator. In the future, when you have similar words or phrases to be translated, the system will show the translator the previous translation and prompt them to use that translation. This will ensure that an identical sentence never has to be translated twice.

#3. Mind your SEO

There are many translators out there who know SEO and know exactly what to do. Once you are setup with a solid translation system, you’ll need to find them.

Luckily, you can find translators online easily searching Google, ProZ, or LinkedIn. For example, you might search for “Translator English French SEO” on Google or LinkedIn, or search for “SEO Translation Services French.”

SEO translation isn’t as hard as it sounds, but if the SEO of your original site is janky, you might get some janky SEO slipping into your target languages too. Therefore, we always recommend a good SEO revision prior to localizing your website.

#4. Make use of the In-context website translation feature in WBT

This is perhaps one of the best feature for translators for a long time! Wordbee Translator can identify the correct web page for your content and knows which text goes where even though the file being translated is a bilingual XLIFF. The benefit of this feature is that the translator sees the webpage as it actually appears, and types in the translation right on the site. This saves a lot of time in terms of reviewing and shortening strings.

#5. Automatic reports and tracking

Efficient reporting facilities are an essential tool for any business. Important strategic decisions are made based on operational and financial data in tabular form or graphics, understanding volume and growth of your business, evaluating vendors and clients, seeing trends and much more, and most importantly they help your business to figure out the ROI for your localization.