A quick and easy guide to translation management for websites

Translation management is how you manage your project’s translation process, from translating your content to displaying it on your site, and everything in between. And while there are several different types of translation projects (from translating documents, to mobile apps, to websites), there are mainly two ways of handling the actual translation process. 

Using a translation agency

If you go this route, the basic steps involve finding a translation agency or freelancer, sending them the content you need translating, waiting to get their translations back, and then uploading it on your site. The pro of an agency is that you’re getting professional translation services. This will, however, involve you managing a lot of the translation process yourself (delivering content, receiving content, displaying the content, creating unique URLs for your translated sites, making sure your translated site is optimized for multilingual SEO, etc.).

Using a translation tool

This combines machine translation engines, human translation, and translation management software to automate your translation process. Software can quickly translate your content into its new language, cutting down a lot of the back-and-forth between parties and centralizing your project. It will also take care of technical aspects such as displaying your translations. And a tool like Weglot (which we’ll cover extensively in this post) also gives you a translation management platform where you can make edits to your translated content, involve professional translators, create a localization workflow and streamline your project management.

With those 2 options in mind, we’ll take look at how marketing managers can handle their website translations easily with scalability at the forefront and show you how to simply manage your website translations.

Ready to translate your website? Sign up for Weglot’s free trial.

Translation tools are an impactful way of reducing the manual tasks associated with a website translation project. By automating such a process you benefit from keeping your project away from spreadsheets and centralizing it in one platform for better translation management.

With Weglot, we take a 2-layered translation approach:

• Firstly, Weglot automatically translates 100% of your website using the best machine translation providers on the market, including DeepL, Google Translate and Microsoft Translator. This ensures the whole of your website is translated. Note, Weglot also displays your website under language subdomains or subdirectories too.
• The next part is how you manage the translation quality which builds into the overall translation management process. With all your translations managed under one dashboard, here you can centralize and manage your teammates, in-house translators, or even order professional translators through Weglot to manually review your translated content. (Click here to read our case study on how one of our US-based customers used this two-layered approach to add dozens of languages.)

Quickly translate your entire site with Weglot

To get started, just add Weglot to your site. Weglot was specifically created to require no code, you don’t need to create your own API integration or take hours of internal resources from your dev/IT team.

Here’s a quick video that shows you how simple it is:

After Weglot is added to your site, you can set up and customize your translation project and define your localization process. Note, your website is instantly translated, you can choose to put it in ‘Private Mode’ until you’re ready to go live.

• First, select your target language (which languages you want your content translated into). Weglot can translate your content into 100+ languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Chinese and custom-languages.  
• (Optional) Then pick pages/sections you don’t want translated. You can skip this if you want every page and section translated. 
• (Optional) Create a project glossary. You can easily create a glossary for your project, creating rules to determine what words you do not want translated or if you always want a word translated in a specific way. Plus, if/when you use professional translators, these glossaries will be automatically applied to make sure their edits follow the same rules.

Your new translated site is ready within minutes. And because Weglot takes care of both the translating and displaying aspect of website translation, your newly translated site is automatically displayed under language subdomains/subdirectories of your main site. 

This means every translated site gets a unique URL. For example, weglot.com is our English site, while weglot.com/de/ is our German site, this was set up automatically by Weglot as part of the translation process. You can then go further into localization process by translating your URLs which not only improves the user experience but can also be beneficial for international SEO.

Are you ready to translate your website? Start your free trial today. Or keep reading to learn about the rest of Weglot’s translation management features (from our translation editor tool to our multilingual SEO best practices).

Weglot offers more than machine translation, it’s also a full-fledged translation management platform where you can:

• Easily manage your translations (including getting a real-time look at how your translated content fits within your site’s design/layout through our Visual Editor).
• Order translation services from professional translators or add your own translation team (or bilingual teammates). Here you can then assign translations through the dashboard and your translator/teammate will receive a notification.
• Make use of Weglot’s automatic content detection to make sure your translated site is updated whenever you update your main site. Weglot automatically sycns with your live site so you’ll never display untransated content, this is especially beneficial for ecommerce stores with hundreds of new project launches.
• Make sure your translated site is following the best practices of multilingual SEO.

How to manage your translations 

After Weglot has translated your site, you can access all of your translations from your dashboard:

On your dashboard, you can see:

• Your translated text and which languages your site is currently translated into.
• Choose if you want to add any new languages.
• Manage your translations through import/export.
• Edit your translations in context with our Visual Editor. 
• Access your glossary.

How to edit your translations

Because Weglot is a translation management platform, you can use it to easily edit your translations and even assign projects to translators. 

All of your translations are readily available through your Weglot Dashboard.

All of your translations are readily available through your Weglot Dashboard.

You can find specific translations by looking up the URL, typing in the phrase or word you want to find, or you can use Weglot’s Visual Editor to quickly navigate your live site.

Our Visual Editor is also a great way to see how your translated content will look with your site’s design/layout.

This is a major plus point for our customers, including Goodpatch, a global design company. When they wanted to add another language to their site, they wanted a translation management system (TMS) that reflected their company’s overall design-driven approach and made it easy for their fully remote team to collaborate.

They found just what they were looking for with Weglot. 

“[Weglot] was accessible to all our disciplines, from content to design to strategy, and everyone could find their way around quickly…all of us could do fast test edits, see how [the page] looked, and get changes approved quickly.”

When Goodpatch translated its beautifully designed English site into German, they used Weglot to make sure the German translations would fit nicely within their site’s design. By using our Visual Editor, they were able to easily avoid overlapping text, broken designs, and other issues. 

Ordering professional translation services through Weglot

If you don’t have a team of translators that can help with your manual translations, you can order professional translation services directly through Weglot:

Simply pick which translations you want reviewed by a professional translator and pay for your order. In 24-48 hours your order is completed, and the translation is automatically updated and live on your site. 

Keep your translated site up-to-date with automatic content detection

Weglot makes it easy to manage your translated sites going forward with Automatic Content Detection. When you make changes to your original site (whether you’re adding content, deleting it, or revising it) those changes are immediately reflected on your translated site.

Optimize your translated site for SEO

Weglot’s translation management platform also helps your translated sites with search engine optimization (SEO).

Weglot’s software will automatically:

• Add hreflang tags to your source code that lets Google know about the translated versions of your site
• Translate your on-page SEO content, like metadata and alt tags.
• Create unique URLs for each translated version of your site, creating subdirectories/subdomains for each URL.

In this article, we talked about different ways of setting up a translation project for improved workflow. One is outsourcing the translation to an agency, however, dealing with file formats and handling the project outside of a centralized dashboard can prove challenging.

The other way, using Weglot’s translation management software, allows you full control over your translation and localization projects and is easier, faster, and streamlined.

With Weglot, you get:

• An instantly live and translated website. Through Weglot, you can translate an entire site within minutes. Plus, Weglot automatically detects changes to your content, so it can keep your translated sites updated. 
  
• A translation management platform, where you can create glossaries for each project, edit translations, use a visual editor to see how translated content works with your design, and order professional translation services. 
  
• Translated sites that follow the best practices outlined by Google for mastering multilingual SEO.

To translate your site today, start your Weglot free trial or contact our sales team to discuss further.