Website translation

What’s the best translation platform for websites?

What’s the best translation platform for websites?
Elizabeth Pokorny
Written by
Elizabeth Pokorny
Elizabeth Pokorny
Written by
Elizabeth Pokorny
Reviewed
Elizabeth Pokorny
Reviewed by
Updated on
June 26, 2023

When you’re searching for the best translation platform for your website, there are some crucial must-haves to look out for. 

To make translating your site easy, accurate, and efficient, your platform should have:

  • Advanced machine translation software that translates your content. Machine translation tools can quickly translate your entire site, and save you the hassle of extracting your content and sending it to translators while managing different files and deliverables. For example, Weglot can translate an entire website in just a few minutes and display your newly translated site on subdomains/subdirectories under your main site—all without requiring any additional work on your end.
  • A dashboard where you can control your translations. No matter the scope of your project, you want complete control over your translation process. This includes choosing which pages, sections, or even specific words get translated. 
  • A way to edit your translations (and order translation services from professional translators). Depending on your project, you may want to edit your translations. If you have your own translation team, then you want a platform that makes it easy for them to log on and access your translations. But if you don’t have your own team, then you want a platform that makes it easy to find professional translators.
  • A way to keep your site updated. As you add new content to your site, you don’t want to have to remember to translate it. The best translation platform automatically detects new content and translates it for you. 
  • Search engine optimization tools.  Finally, your translation platform should help you optimize your translated site for search engines, making it so your translated site appears in front of the right audience (i.e., your French site shows up for French queries, etc.).

These features make it easy to translate your site and make edits to content—and they help your site rank in search engines like Google—all must-haves for a translation project.

In this post, we look at how Weglot, our translation platform, fulfills these must-haves. 

We’ll also look at real websites that are currently using Weglot to keep their content up-to-date and translated.

How Weglot’s Translation Platform Can Quickly and Accurately Translate Your Website

Weglot’s translation platform can easily translate any website, and you have the choice of using only machine translation to translate your website or supplementing machine translation with professional translator services ordered through Weglot.

Most of our customers rely solely on machine translation (i.e. they never edit any of the translations Weglot has provided for them) but whether you edit your translated content or not depends on the scope of your project and the type of content that you’re translating.

To help you pick the best method within our platform, we go over each one in more detail and provide examples of how different types of businesses translate their content with Weglot.

Using Machine Translation

The first step to getting a fully translated site is adding Weglot to your website. Weglot works with any website, and you don’t need any developers to set it up. 

FYI: We have ready-made tutorials for popular CMS platforms, such as Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, and more. 

Once Weglot is added, you can customize how it translates your site, including:

Weglot glossary
  • Selecting which language(s) you want your site translated into. Weglot can translate into 100+ languages. For a full list, click here.
  • Picking pages/sections you want translated. Sometimes you won’t need to translate every page on your website for a new market, and with Weglot, you can exclude pages and even blocks within a URL.
  • Adding words that you do not want translated (or words that you always want translated). You can add specific words that you do not want translated to your glossary. For example, you can exclude brand names like Apple, Excel, and Windows from your translations. And conversely, you can add specific words that you always want translated a certain way. 

After this is done, you’ll get a fully-translated website within minutes. Plus, when you use Weglot, your translated site is automatically displayed under language subdomains/subdirectories of your main site. This means that when you use Weglot as your translation platform, you don’t need to worry about hosting or implementation—all of that is taken care of by our software.

For plenty of our customers, this is where they stop. They sign up for Weglot, make use of the machine translation and launch their translated site instantly. They don’t want to manage their translations or make any edits. But for those who do, Weglot is a full-service translation platform that lets you edit your translations and manage translators. More on this below. 

How to Edit Translations with Weglot

When you use Weglot, you can easily make edits to your translations. There are several reasons why you may want to make edits.

For example, Felt Bicycles uses Weglot’s machine translation to give their team of translators a fully-translated site that they can work off of, making it faster for them to publish new content.

Specifically, Felt has divided its website content into two categories: sections that only need machine translation (menus, submenus, and shorter sentences—overall about ⅓ of their content) and sections where they want their team of translators to review translations, such as the site’s blog, product descriptions, and branded stories. 

Editing translations with Weglot is simple: You can access all of your translations through your Weglot dashboard.

translations list

You can see how many words have been translated, how many translations have been reviewed, and then you can click within each translation and review each piece of translated content.

You can find specific content by searching for a phrase, a URL, or using Weglot’s Visual Editor (a good tool for doing a quality assurance check on your site, making sure your translations work well with your design and formatting).

visual editor new

Ordering Professional Translation Services Through Weglot

If you don’t have a translation team but still want specific pages reviewed by a professional translator, you can order that service through your Weglot Dashboard. 

You can select the tone of the content you want translated, and attach any glossary you have set up that will explain to the translator your specific guidelines.

pro translations

Once the translation is completed and approved, it’s automatically updated on your site. 

You don’t need to worry about extracting or downloading your content and sending it over an email to a translator, and then getting it back as a Google Doc that you then need to hand off to your development team.

Other Key Benefits of Using Weglot’s Translation Platform

Our translation platform is an all-in-one tool that companies can use to manage their website translation process. When you use Weglot, you don’t need your own translators or developers to help you manage your content. 

Weglot also helps keep your translated sites up-to-date and optimized for SEO—without requiring any extra work on your end. 

Keep Your Translated Site Up-to-Date with Automatic Content Detection

With Weglot, your translated site will always be up-to-date. Anytime you add new content or revise existing content, it automatically gets translated by Weglot. 

This is a major time saver because you’re not personally responsible for managing a workflow where you need to make sure any new content is also sent to a translation team.

Optimize Your Translated Site for SEO

Weglot helps your translated site rank within search engines by making sure your site is optimized according to the best practices of Google’s multilingual SEO.

Weglot’s software:

  • Adds ahrefs tags to your source code that tell Google which languages your site is available in.
  • Translates your on-page SEO content, like metadata and alt tags.
  • Creates subdirectories/subdomains for each translated site, giving each site a unique URL.

By taking care of these important SEO elements, you don’t need to delegate this job to anyone on your team or find an SEO specialist who has experience in ranking translated sites. 

If you’re a visual learner, check out this quick guide on multilingual SEO tips to boost your website’s international reach:

Alternative Types of Translation Platforms

Above we covered Weglot’s translation platform, which makes it easy for any site, of any size, to quickly and efficiently translate its content and optimize it for SEO. Weglot reduces your manual translation management, while giving you an easy way to access and edit website translations—and manage professional translators, if needed.

But depending on your specific use case, you might consider looking at two different options:

  1. A translation management platform for mobile apps or designers.
  2. A translation agency.

There are several different types of translation management platforms (we compare a couple of them here). These types of platforms might be useful if you have a large team of in-house translators and want to set up complex approval workflows, or if you’re designing mobile apps (or something that isn’t a website) and need to integrate design tools like Figma and Illustrator into your translation process. 

A translation agency is when you’re working with a team of professional translators. As a refresher: when you use Weglot, you get machine translation software as well as the option to order professional translation services. An agency will rely mostly—or only—on professional translators, and they may have their own platform for managing the projects. 

An agency may be worth considering if you’re translating deeply complex technical, legal, or medical content that needs to be reviewed by specific types of translators in your field.

A Quick Recap on the Best Translation Platform for Your Website

When you use Weglot as your translation platform, you’re getting a tool that:

  • Can quickly and accurately translate your site into over 100 different languages within minutes.
  • Gives you complete control over how your site is translated, including specific URLs or words from the translation process.
  • Gives you a platform where your translators can easily access and edit your content. And if you don’t have a team of translators, you can order professional translation services directly through Weglot. 
  • Automatically displays your translated site on subdomains of your main site, giving each translated site a unique URL.
  • Optimizes your translated site for SEO, so the right site is getting in front of the right audience in tools like Google.

Ready to translate your site today? Start your free trial.

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