How Do I Managing Multi-lingual Content

Diego asks: How Do I Managing Multi-lingual Content

Professional translation and localization are now a necessity for companies and organizations alike. Having all of your material in a language that is foreign to the reader presents serious challenges when you are doing business in a global marketplace. The question is, how to you be sur e that your translation is accurate.
How do you ensure that foreign character sets appear appropriately on your website? How can you avoid your staff having to copy and paste material in a language they don’t know into your content management system (a recipe for disaster, if our experience is anything to go by!)? How do you ensure you are using translation technologies effectively to keep costs down? We’ve all witnessed some well-intentioned but horrendously inefficient attempts to take a perfectly good website and make it multi-lingual. It is not a simple matter, and it’s something translation service providers are best placed to handle in consultation with client companies. As with other web projects, it is best to plan how a multi-lingual website will work well before it is actually constructed.

Translate and they will come?

Of course, there is little point having a slick multi-lingual website if you aren’t able to attract enough of the right visitors to make a good return on your investment in translation agency content. The key is to establish where you need to appear online, be it through search engine listings or on partner websites, in order to drive targeted traffic. To achieve this, you really need to have an understanding of the ‘online scene’ in each of your target markets, and a partner who can help you achieve the positioning that will generate returns.