Translating your ecommerce site into another language will help you expand your business into new markets. But how do you go about doing the actual translation of your content?
One option is hiring an ecommerce website translation agency to translate your site.
At first glance, this sounds reasonable. Translation agencies use professional translators to translate your original content into your chosen language. But for many ecommerce companies, a translation agency comes with too many drawbacks to be a practical solution.
Translation agencies are:
- Expensive: Prices vary because agencies base their quotes on how much content you need translated, your site’s native language, and what language you’re translating into (along with other factors), but an agency can easily charge $20k+ to provide ecommerce translation services.
- Time-consuming: Using a team of professional translators takes time. You need to deliver the content that you want to be translated to the agency yourself, and then their team needs to translate each word manually.
- Limited in what they offer: An agency will help you with translating your content, but you actually need more than that. You also need the translation implemented on your ecommerce platform, and you want your site optimized for SEO in its new language. Translation agencies don’t help with these things.
That’s why using translation software is going to be a better option for your ecommerce store.
In this post, we look at what most ecommerce companies need from translation services, and the benefits of choosing software over an agency.
Note: Weglot is an ecommerce website translation software that can translate your website into over 100 languages. Weglot has both automatic machine translations (for speed) and manual translation services (for when you want the human touch). Get in touch to learn more.
What ecommerce Websites Need from a Translation Service
Generally speaking, here’s what your ecommerce company will need from a website translation platform:
- Fast translations: The faster you can get your website translated, the faster you can start selling products to your new audience. Software excels here because it lets you do machine translations. This means you can get your ecommerce site translated in minutes, rather than weeks or months.
- High level of customizations: Each ecommerce site will need different things, from the pages that should be translated to the specific quality level of each translation and how many new languages they need to translate into.
- Implementation (i.e. uploads): You don’t just want your content translated, you want it translated and put live on your site.
- Ongoing additions/changes: You may want to update copy, experiment with split-testing different landing pages, or add new products to your ecommerce store. This means you’ll need new content translated down the line, or you may want to go back and change previously-translated content.
- SEO services: You want to make sure the new translated version of your site is optimized for search engines. That way the right audience in that language will find your ecommerce store when looking for products online.
In short, what an ecommerce website needs is very different from what most translation agencies offer.
To see how easy, affordable, and customizable it is to translate your ecommerce site with software. Get in touch to learn more.
How You Can Quickly and Accurately Translate your ecommerce Website with Software
Weglot is translation software that works with any ecommerce platform: Shopify (and Shopify Plus), BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento… you name it. You can use Weglot to quickly and accurately translate your ecommerce content and skip the hassle of using an agency.
Here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to set up Weglot on your site:
There are three key things that make Weglot a better option than using a translation agency for your ecommerce site:
- A website that’s translated in minutes, not days or weeks. Weglot uses automatic neural machine translation from leading providers to translate your content quickly and as accurately as possible. Plus, whenever you add content to your original site, Weglot will automatically update your translated websites.
- Translations you can edit. With Weglot, you can make edits to any of your translated copy on your live site (so any changes you make are automatically updated on your site). Plus, if you don’t have your own translation team, you can outsource the job to professional translators directly through your Weglot account.
- Advanced SEO features. Weglot won’t just translate your ecommerce website, it’ll also make sure your new site is optimized for SEO to help it rank in its new language.
The Perfect Combination of Machine Translation and Human Translation
When you use a translation agency, you’re relying solely on human translation. That’s what makes it so expensive and time-consuming.
That’s why we recommend a faster and more practical method: start out translating your site with machine translation. Then you can use human translators (also through Weglot if you want) as and when you need them.
That’s what The Bradery did. They made use of the first layer of machine translation available through Weglot to get a fully translated multilingual store within minutes. They then used the post-editing features available through the Weglot Dashboard.
Their team easily made edits and approved machine translations to improve the quality of their Spanish translation where needed. This made the entire process of translating their store fast and cost-efficient and enabled an instant launch in Spain.
Plus, machine translation is perfect for ecommerce stores that are constantly updating their product catalogs. When you add new content or products to your store, Weglot automatically translates it. This was a big win for Jimmy Fairly, a French eyewear company that has websites in French, German, Italian, and English.
Since using Weglot, they’ve seen a huge increase in conversions in international markets. And this is due in a large part to the fact that at the beginning of each month they release a brand new collection of 30 eyewear products. Weglot automatically detects new content on their original French site, and then updates all of their translated sites. Easy.
To get started with Weglot, simply pick your source language (i.e. the language your site is currently in) and then pick which language you want it translated into. You can translate into as many languages as you need. We have over 100 different language options, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Urdu, and custom languages.
Bonus Feature: Get Professional Translation Services Through Weglot
Sometimes you’ll want a professional translator to review parts of your ecommerce site. When you do, you can easily order professional translation services through Weglot.
This is still much more affordable and faster than using an agency because you don’t need to track down a translator on your own. Plus, when the translations are ready, they’re automatically updated on your site in 24-48 hours. This cuts out a lot of manual work.
Optimize Your Translated Website for SEO
A translation agency will take your content and translate it. But they won’t help with SEO. So, if you want your on-page SEO translated (alt tags, meta descriptions, and meta titles), you’re going to need to send that content to the agency, too.
But that’s just one small part of optimizing your translated site for SEO. It’s not enough for a significant boost in rankings in your different locations.
With Weglot, we have built-in SEO functionality that will help your ecommerce website rank in its new language. For example:
- We automatically create unique URLs for each translated version of your ecommerce site. These are called subdomains or subdirectories. For example, weglot.com is our English site, while weglot.com/de/ is our German site. You (and search engines) can tell it’s German by the “DE” in the URL. This helps your German-speaking customers know they’re in the right place, and it also tells the search engines that your translated site is meant for German speakers.
- We add tags in your source code that tell Google you have other different translated versions of your site. When Google looks at your site, it’ll see code that tells it you also have other translated versions of your store. This helps Google recommend your site to the right people based on search queries.
By helping your site with SEO, Weglot increases the likelihood that your translated site will reach a wider audience online.
For example, one of our customers is Ron Dorff, a French-Swedish sportswear brand. They used Weglot to translate their French site into German and English. Since translating their huge catalog of 150 products, they’ve seen a 70% increase in international sales. And a lot of that traffic is coming from search engines.
Because Ron Dorff used Weglot to translate their site, they get the right kind of multilingual visibility. So, when a French-speaking customer searches “Ron Dorff Dad t-shirt” in Google, they automatically get taken to the French site, while a German-speaking visitor will get sent to the German site.
Next Steps: Translate Your ecommerce Website with Weglot (Free Trial)
Translation agencies are good at what they do, but they’re expensive, slow, and often limited in what they offer. For fast-moving ecommerce sites looking to grow, that’s not ideal.
Instead, we recommend you use translation software like Weglot.
When you use Weglot to handle your ecommerce translation, you get:
- Fast, high-quality machine translations. You can translate your ecommerce site into multiple languages within minutes.
- Translations you can edit. You can manually edit your translations, either with your own team or with professional translators sourced through Weglot.
- SEO features for your newly-translated site. Weglot’s SEO features will help your translated sites rank in the right search engine and in front of potential customers.
Interested in understanding how Weglot can work for your business? Get in touch to learn more.
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