Translation Solutions: Which Approach Is Right for Your Site?
The U.S. is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. While English may be our official language, the number of people who speak a language other than English at home has actually tripled over the past three decades.
Statistically speaking, the people you serve are probably among them.
You might even know they are. Maybe you’ve noticed an uptick in inquiries from non-English speaking people or tracked demographic changes in your analytics. Either way, chances are good that organizations of all kinds will see more, not less, need for translation — especially those in highly regulated and far-reaching industries, like higher education and healthcare.
So, what do you do when translation becomes a top priority for your organization? Here, we explain how to get started.
3 Solutions for Translating Your Website
Many organizations have an a-ha moment when it comes to translations. For our client Lifespan, that moment came during its rebrand to Brown Health University and a growing audience of non-English speaking people. For another client, Visit California, that moment came when developing their marketing strategies for key global audiences.
Or maybe you’re more like Leica Geosystems, a longtime Oomph client that prioritized translation from the start but needed the right technology to support it.
Whenever the time comes, you have three main options:
Manual translation and publishing
When most people think of translating, manual translation comes to mind. In this scenario, someone on your team or someone you hire translates content by hand and uploads the translation as a separate page to the content management system (CMS).
Translating manually will offer you higher quality and more direct control over the content. You’ll also be able to optimize translations for SEO; manual translation is one of the best ways to ensure the right pages are indexed and findable in every language you offer them. Manual translation also has fewer ongoing technical fees and long-term maintenance attached, especially if you use a CMS like Drupal which supports translations by default.
“Drupal comes multi-lingual out of the box, so it’s very easy for editors to publish translations of their site and metadata,” Oomph Senior UX Engineer Kyle Davis says. “Other platforms aren’t going to be as good at that.”
While manual translation may sound like a winning formula, it can also come at a high cost, pushing it out of reach for smaller organizations or those who can’t allocate a large portion of their budget to translate their website and other materials.
Integration with a real-time API
Ever seen a website with clickable international flags near the top of the page? That’s a translation API. These machine translation tools can translate content in the blink of an eye, helping users of many different languages access your site in their chosen language.
“This is different than manual translation, because you aren’t optimizing your content in any way,” Oomph Senior UX Engineer John Cionci says. “You’re simply putting a widget on your page.”
Despite their plug-and-play reputation, machine translation APIs can actually be fairly curated. Customization and localization options allow you to override certain phrases to make your translations appropriate for a native speaker. This functionality would serve you well if, like Visit California, you have a team to ensure the translation is just right.
Though APIs are efficient, they also do not take SEO or user experience into account. You’re getting a direct real-time translation of your content, nothing more and nothing less. This might be enough if all you need is a default version of a page in a language other than English; by translating that page, you’re already making it more accessible.
However, this won’t always cut it if your goal is to create more immersive, branded experiences — experiences your non-English-speaking audience deserves. Some translation API solutions also aren’t as easy to install and configure as they used to be. While the overall cost may be less than manual translation, you’ll also have an upfront development investment and ongoing maintenance to consider.
Use Case: Visit California
Manual translation doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Visit California has international marketing teams in key markets skilled in their target audiences’ primary languages, enabling them to blend manual and machine translation.
We worked with Visit California to implement machine translation (think Google Translate) to do the heavy lifting. After a translation is complete, their team comes in to verify that all translated content is accurate and represents their brand. Leveraging the glossary overrides feature of Google Cloud Translate V3, they can tailor the translations to their communication objectives for each region. In addition, their Drupal CMS still allows them to publish manual translations when needed. This hybrid approach has proven to be very effective.
Third-party translation services
The adage “You get what you pay for” rings true for translation services. While third-party translation services cost more than APIs, they also come with higher quality — an investment that can be well worth it for organizations with large non-English-speaking audiences.
Most translation services will provide you with custom code, cutting down on implementation time. While you’ll have little to no technical debt, you will have to keep on top of recurring subscription fees.
What does that get you? If you use a proxy-based solution like MotionPoint, you can expect to have content pulled from your live site, then freshly translated and populated on a unique domain.
“Because you can serve up content in different languages with unique domains, you get multilingual results indexed on Google and can be discovered,” Oomph Senior Digital Project Manager Julie Elman says.
Solutions like Ray Enterprise Translation, on the other hand, combine an API with human translation, making it easier to manage, override, moderate, and store translations all within your CMS.
Use Case: Leica Geosystems
Leica’s Drupal e-commerce store is active in multiple countries and languages, making it difficult to manage ever-changing products, content, and prices. Oomph helped Leica migrate to a single-site model during their migration from Drupal 7 to 8 back in 2019.
“Oomph has been integral in providing a translation solution that can accommodate content generation in all languages available on our website,” says Jeannie Records Boyle, Leica’s e-Commerce Translation Manager.
This meant all content had one place to live and could be translated into all supported languages using the Ray Enterprise Translation integration (formerly Lingotek). Authors could then choose which countries the content should be available in, making it easier to author engaging and accurate content that resonates around the world.
“Whether we spin up a new blog or product page in English or Japanese, for example, we can then translate it to the many other languages we offer, including German, Spanish, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Brazil Portuguese, Italian, and French,” Records Boyle says.
Taking a Strategic Approach to Translation
Translation can be as simple as the click of a button. However, effective translation that supports your business goals is more complex. It requires that you understand who your target audiences are, the languages they speak, and how to structure that content in relation to the English content you already have.
The other truth about translation is that there is no one-size-fits-all option. The “right” solution depends on your budget, in-house skills, CMS, and myriad other factors — all of which can be tricky to weigh.
Here at Oomph, we’ve helped many clients make their way through website translation projects big and small. We’re all about facilitating translations that work for your organization, your content admins, and your audience — because we believe in making the Web as accessible as possible for all.
Want to see a few recent examples or dive deeper into your own website translation project? Let’s talk.
