Tomedes Blog

In these competitive times it has become imperative for companies to have a web site in order to give themselves an edge over the competition. A web site is the easiest and least expensive way to tap a foreign market. However, there are certain issues that should be taken care of in the process of web site translation otherwise all the efforts put into the web site translation would turn out to be futile and may turn out to be injurious instead of being helpful.

Before getting a web site translation you should discuss with your professional translation provider about what could be the potential side effects of translating from the source language to the target language chosen by you. For example, it might happen that the target language occupies more space than the source language. In such cases the translated content might not fit into the fixed areas of your website. There are languages whose fonts are remarkably bigger compared to say English, then there are languages which are written without any space between words, like Lao and Thai. Languages like Chinese use symbols. Now translating from say English which uses letters and words, to Chinese might require quite a lot of other changes as well.

Your translation provider’s work is not done once the web site translation is completed. This is because a web site needs to be updated regularly according to the various events taking place in the targeted country, as well as in the company that owns the website. All these need to be updated and uploaded as and when the situation arises.

The content of your website should also be optimized for locally preferred search engines. Though Google, MSN and Yahoo are the most popular ones around the world, there are some countries like France and China whose residents use their native search engine. Consequently, if your website is targeting such a country you would need to get it optimized for the locally preferred search engines.

Lastly, when you maintain a web site in foreign language(s), you can expect to get query/ feedback mails in that language, which you would need to understand and reply.

To sum up getting a web site translation is a long term commitment and once you plunge into it, you should make it a point to satisfy all aspects and go the whole hog.

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