By making your website available in various language versions, you can reach more users. However, before you begin the process of translating your site, you need to be aware of the best practices to adopt.
Four of the best website translation practices you should utilize are choosing the right translation tool, enabling your visitors to select their preferred languages, translating your URLs, and avoiding presenting your language options with flags.
Choose the Right Translation Tool for Your Needs
One of the most important practices you need to consider for translating your website is choosing the right translation tool.
There are multiple options available. For instance, you could use professional or non-professional human translation, computer translation, or translation software. Each has its own pros and cons.
When looking at the right approach for your website, consider whether the translation tool will work for your specific website, whether the translation tool can translate your content into the languages that you need, whether the translation can help with your SEO ranking, how accurate the translation will be, and how long the translation will take.
The best website translation tool will work on any website, use both machine and human translation, and help you with your SEO efforts.
Enable Your Website Visitors to Choose Their Preferred Language
While you should optimize your website so that it appears in the right language for the country that users are from, you also need to allow users from any country to choose their preferred language.
For instance, while English is the dominant language in the United States, there are actually more Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. than there are in Spain, so you should make sure you offer a Spanish version of your website’s content if your site is based in the U.S.
Your visitors should be made to feel welcome and they should be able to access content in their preferred way, so while your default setting should be the most common language used in your geographic area, you should make it simple for users to switch their language preferences.
You could even optimize your site so that language preferences are remembered for each visitor, to further improve the user experience.
Translate Your URLs in Addition to Your Content
One of the greatest benefits of using the best translation tools is you can improve your SEO rankings. However, to fully improve your SEO in different regions, you need to ensure you translate web addresses as well as the content of your web pages.
By using translated URLs, they will become readable by search engines in other countries. Sure, you want to rank highly on Google. But consider that many countries, like China and Russia for example, use other more popular search engines.
By using country-code top-level domains, you can also demonstrate to your international markets that you’re catering to their needs.
Avoid Presenting Your Language Options with Countries’ Flags
Many websites use flags to indicate which languages are available. But you should put the language in writing, in its original language, as well as using flags. The reason is some countries’ flags are very similar, so you don’t want to confuse your users.
Also, many countries speak the same language, so a flag doesn’t necessarily help people identify the language options you have available. For example, there are lots of Spanish-speaking countries in the world besides Spain.
Flags can sometimes be culturally or geographically insensitive too. So, make sure you clearly show what languages your site has available in ways besides using country’s flags.