01 Mar
One of the best ways to increase your online audience is to build a multi language website. A site with content in the various languages you serve enables you to communicate effectively with your visitors.
In an increasingly connected world, multi-language websites are becoming more common. A multiple language website is a great way to make your website more user-friendly and connect with new audiences.
But at the same time, creating a multi language website is a big undertaking. While there are plenty of user-friendly website builders out there, you need a tool that will let you not only create a great-looking website, but also translate every element, from the text to the images, into different languages.
Let’s learn how to make a website that is easily accessible to all languages and localized to different regions.
What is a multi language website?
A multi language website is a website where the content is written in more than one language. The information displayed in different languages is often the same, but maybe tailored for different audiences.
Now, imagine if you added Chinese and Spanish to your English-only website. This would give you the opportunity to reach 27.2% more of the internet users, which is exactly why multilingual websites are important.
Steps to build a multi language website?
Here are some steps for building a multi language website for your business.
1. Translate your website content
A multilingual site’s most essential component is translation. If you don’t speak the additional languages you’re adding to your site, you have several options for translating your content.
You can invest in a professional translator, or you can use a neural machine translation service for a quick fix, like Google Translate. If you’re using the latter, make sure to review and proofread your translated content as there are many grammatical or cultural nuances that can get lost in translation.
During the translation process, make sure not to overlook any parts of your site’s copy, from the text on your homepage design and menu, to the retailing details on your online store.
As you’re translating your website content, you may experience that some things can’t transfer over from one language to another, even requiring more context for clarity. Therefore, pay attention to cultural references. Second, make sure to find equivalent phrases, or to take a similar tone, when switching over to your secondary language(s).
2. Adapt your visual content
Text is not the only element on your page that you can “translate.” The same principle goes for images, too. If you offer a localized service, for example, and want to display photos of it from sites across the globe, you can select the requisite images to match the regional language of the text.
Say you have the Statue of Liberty featured on your homepage to illustrate a cultural landmark. You might want to swap that image with the Eiffel Tower for your French-speaking audience on your multilingual site. International visitors will have a better connection with your site if you localize your visual content, since images carry different meanings for different cultures.
3. Modify your SEO for all languages
Once you have completed the translation stage, it’s time to make sure your work can be found in all of its linguistic glory across the internet. That entails optimizing each of your new pages for search engines.
Each international market comes with its own internet searching habits and SEO needs. Start by conducting keyword research in your new language – and update your site’s SEO settings accordingly. That way, potential customers searching the web for a business or solution like yours in their native language will have a higher chance of stumbling across your site.
4. Enable your site to be multilingual
Now that your web content is all ready to go, it’s time to let visitors of all different languages know that they can access your website.
Show off your linguistic talent with an easy-to-spot language menu. You can customize it to your liking, representing each language with mini flag icons, written abbreviations or a combination of the two, to signal to users the options that are available for their choosing.
We suggest placing this language toggle in your primary header navigation. You can even use subtle animation features, to draw visitors’ attention to the translation option. The longer they have to search, the higher the chance they might leave in favor of a page they can actually understand.
A word for the wise: if you offer two or three languages, flag or word icons that appear right in the header menu will be perfect. If you offer more, though, consider a drop down menu of lettered abbreviations to avoid clutter.
The process of creating a multilingual site can feel daunting at first. Yet, believe it or not, once you’ve created a professional website in your primary language, you’ve already taken a major step toward simplifying this process. The site structure you’ve created can now serve as a roadmap to help you in adapting to a second, or even third and fourth, language.
Cons of having your website in several languages
Let’s start with the problems and drawbacks: creating and maintaining a website in several languages is not so simple and it is a major extra effort.
1. Complexity of a multilingual website
Creating a multilingual website is much more complex than creating it in a single language. You must consider whether or not to create your multi-site web, which language support plugins to use, and so on. In the WordPress multilingual – When, Why and How, explains the details of how to do it and survive.
2. Work involved in each translation
If creating content already takes time, translating it is an extra step to keep in mind. Also, don’t be fooled: if you think you’ll only have to translate your website once, you’re wrong. The content of a website is updated much faster than you can imagine! Besides, we don’t only talk about text, many times you also have to update contents included in images and videos, something that can involve a lot of work.
3. Translate implies interpreting
Moreover, translations are not direct: you have to know how to interpret expressions and phrases, understand the terminology used in each context, etc. That’s why WordPress Polyglots that translate WordPress core plugins and themes into other languages have a translation glossary in each language.
And to complete the picture, in the same language, each geographical area has its own localisms. For example, in the English WordPress community, in addition to the original American English language we have 6 different teams dedicated to the different variants of the English language (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pirate, South Africa, and UK).
4. Support service in that language
Another problem with offering a product and service on your website in more than one language is that it not only implies showing it in that language on the web, it also means that you are able to offer a support service in that language. And as you well know, giving a good support service is just as important (or more) than having a great product.
Advantages of having your multilingual website
Let’s see the advantages of having more than one language on your website:
1. Increase your potential audience
This is the most obvious. The more languages your website has, the easier it will be to increase your audience. Most of us visit only websites in the languages we speak. Exceptionally, we will visit a website in a language that we do not understand and we will helped by a translator.
For example, if our website is only in Spanish we have already seen that our potential audience is less than 8% of all Internet users in the world. By the time your website becomes bilingual with Spanish and English, your potential audience has already grown to 33% of all digital people. I think that there is no need to add more comments on the great advantage that this may imply.
2. Increase the conversion
And it’s not just a matter of increasing the number of potential customers. Many people who visit websites in more than one language only buy in those that are in their native language. It is one thing to understand a content and another to buy a product or service. Reading in your native language generates a feeling of closeness and trust.
3. Increase accessibility
Following recommendations on how to optimize your website, you should be concerned that your website is as accessible as possible for everyone. When we talk about the accessibility of a website, we are not only talking about optimizing the combination of fonts, sizes, and colors that facilitate reading, but also that as many people as possible can access your content in their own language.
4. You increase your keyword range
As you well know, the basis of SEO is how Google classifies your website for certain words. The advantage of having a site in several languages is that you can try to classify versions of the same page by keywords in different languages.
This can be a great advantage, especially as we saw at the beginning of this post, more than 50% of all content is in English, but content in any other language is less than 7% of all content. The level of competition has nothing to do with it and it can be much easier to attract visitors in other languages than in English.
5. Increase SEO
And increasing the number of keywords that your website can reach leads to an increase in SEO. Your success in attracting traffic in a language contributes to your ranking in English and others.
This is due to the fact that Google looks at the success of other pages to determine if the new page you create should have a chance. Therefore, the better the performance of your pages in a language, the greater the momentum that you will get in others.
5 reasons you need a multilingual website
Here are 5 big and pretty important reasons to incorporate multiple languages into your website:
1. The internet isn’t used only by english speakers
Despite the fact they make up most of the global users, English speakers aren’t the only ones using the internet. There are other widely used languages and if you implement them into your website, you’ll be able to reach many more people.
After you’ve turned the potential customers into customers, they will recommend your business to their friends and family and maybe even post about it on social media, spreading the word of your business and giving you more credibility.
2. Showing your customers that you care about them
It must feel great to enter a website you don’t understand a word of and not be forced to use the Google translate version. So, by including languages other than English, you’re telling your non-English speaking customers that you care about them too and that their language is just as important.
3. Multilingual website will increase your sales
We already mentioned that having multiple languages helps you gain more customers. And what comes with more customers? More sales. If you add another language to your website, there is a potential increase of sales of 100%. So, if you added 4 widely used languages, your sales could increase by 400%.
When it comes to sales, multilingual websites also help establish and build trust, especially with people who are wary of online purchases. Think about it, if you wanted to buy a product and the website was in a language you didn’t understand, would you make the purchase? The people I asked all said no.
If you were really determined to own the product, you could always translate the page on your own using online translators, but they just wouldn’t be as accurate and could provide you with bad information. Most people wouldn’t go through this step and would just close the website and look for another that offers a similar product.
4. Being more successful than your competition
We mentioned how saturated every market is nowadays and that competition is huge no matter what your business deals with. A multilingual website is a great way of standing out from your competitors.
Let’s take the example from earlier. Imagine if someone wanted to buy a product, but the website it was on wasn’t multilingual. Naturally, they would move on and look for another website that provided a similar product. Then, they would come across your business and see that your multilingual website had the option of their first language. This is exactly how you beat your competitors.
5. People finding you using search engines
Google doesn’t provide only results in English. In fact, there are quite a few dozens of languages that you can select and Google will show you results in. If you have a multilingual website, it will appear in the search pages of the languages your website is on, giving you more chances of people finding your business.
Additionally, there are other search engines besides Google and in other languages, as well. Take Baidu, for example. It receives about 60% of search traffic in China. There’s also Naver, the South Korean search engine, as well as Yandex, the Russian search engine.
If your multilingual website includes these languages, there is a chance that it will appear on their search pages (do keep in mind that there are other factors that can influence this, and crawlers can refuse to show your website if it’s not compliant with the search engine rules).
Ways languages can be used in a multilingual website
There isn’t only one way of displaying multiple language options. Here are the three ways web developers implement multiple languages into a website:
1. Drop-down menu
This is quite a unique way of featuring multiple languages and as such, you won’t see it often. When using this method, web developers create two drop-down menus in different languages and place them one next to the other.
This way, when a visitor enters a website, they’ll see the word ‘menu’ in their language, they’ll hover over it and see all the different options and links and be able to read them.
2. Tabs on a multilingual website
This is the most frequently used option when it comes to multilingual websites. Web developers create small navigations that contain the names of the languages that are available on the website. Once you click them, the website changes in language. These can be placed anywhere, but we can most often find them on the top right of websites, sometimes even the bottom left.
3. Flags to signify different languages
This design choice is pretty outdated. With minimalism in full swing, there is no space for flags, and there aren’t many aesthetics that they fit into. Web developers usually place them in the top left of the screen, and after you click a flag, a small drop-down menu will open and show other flags and languages that you can select.
Mistakes to avoid when creating your multilingual website
Translating isn’t easy nor quick. Some websites can take days to translate, depending on the size of their content, but even with smaller websites, one should be careful not to make mistakes because they could cost them conversions. Here are some common mistakes that people make when it comes to multilingual websites:
1. Misplaced language option
Make sure that your visitors can find the language options easily. I remember visiting a website a while ago and seeing the language options on the bottom, in the footer. I didn’t need a different language option, but I imagine that the people who do have a hard time finding it when they have to scroll all the way down and read the footer contents.
2. Bad translation
I mentioned Google Translate earlier and how it isn’t reliable. This free translator can be great in some instances, for example, if you’re trying to get the overall message of a paragraph, but when it comes to website translations, it’s a big no. Hire a translator to translate your website for you. Even though AI is getting better by the day, machine translation is still not as good as a human one. Good translators aren’t cheap, but it greatly pays off in the long run.
3. Lack of special characters
Many languages have special characters and their translations absolutely need to have them. If they don’t, it shows a lack of professionalism on your part, and the visitor may feel disrespected. There is a special code you can use on your website, called UTF-8, that will make sure that special characters don’t get omitted.
4. Incorrect formatting
Not every country uses the same time and date format. Using the wrong format can result in people thinking you’re unprofessional and that you don’t really care about their country. Make sure to use the proper way of time and date formats in your translations.
Wrap up
Language is part of human identity, making it an important part of all our lives. By incorporating different languages into your monolingual website you can reach a significant amount of new customers, which will lead not only to more sales but will also bring your business more credibility and a better relationship with your customers.
To provide your site visitors and customers an outstanding experience in their native language, it’s also worth ensuring that you look beyond your multi language website. Consider translating your marketing materials and customer support.
Also, consider your multi language website’s speed and performance. In some countries that aren’t lucky enough to have fast internet speeds, downloading large language packs makes it more difficult for visitors to access your content.
With the right multi language website translation plugin and a site design that provides easy-to-use translation options, you’ll be helping customers with a visually appealing UI and UX in their preferred language.