7 reasons why website translation is not working

7 Reasons why website translation is not working

The advent of internet and globalization has made large business organizations to reach out to a big target audience across the globe, and your customers who reside in various countries, do not follow and communicate in one language anymore. Tapping international and non-English speaking audience has become a priority, if businesses have to be successful. Gone are the days, when communication and business happened in one universal language, English. If your target audience has to become your esteemed customer, then you have to break the language barrier. This has mostly been tried to address to website translators. These website translators, allow the visitors to visit and have a look at your website, in their own language. This allows a whole lot of various language target audience to flock and have a look at your website. We all know that there are less English speaking internet users, and hence having website translation presents the information to these thousands of users who can be your potential target audience.

Various reasons why website translation might not be helpful enough

But off late, website translation may not be a smart solution to reach out to your potential clients, due to various reasons. You might not achieve 100% translation accuracy for the website translation, because

phrases are not put out professionally well in the other language, and it does not make an impact, as done by the original language. Website translation might go wrong due to various reasons discussed

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Automatic or Machine translations being used: Machine translation might promise you quick and cheaper solutions, but do not get carried away by the same, as they do not guarantee professional flow and appropriate structured translation as humans do. If humans are your target audience, then the right tone, dialect and colloquialism in which the language is conveyed also becomes very important, that might not be delivered through machines or automatic translations. Cultural and local content sometimes is seen missing when machine translation is used.

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Knowledge of relevant subject matter missing: Whenever a translation ought to be done, there are specific rules, and the machine or computer, just obeys the rules, and does the translation without specifically trying to understand or correlate industry jargons.

Sometimes the machine fails to understand the nuances of the language, and hence results in poor translated documents. Sometimes, to ensure appropriate translated text, ensure localization is utilized. (E.g., Currency, Date formats etc). Localisation basically ensures adapting your website to the culture of the new market.

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Translation between letter-based and symbolic-based languages: Translation between letter-based and symbolic-based languages, especially English to Chinese becomes extremely difficult when there is website translation. The flow of the language, dialect, and syntax is lost. Professional and 100% accurate translation can rarely be guaranteed.

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HTML, PHP and WordPress related issues: Most of the website translators support HTML and hence work very well with HTML templates. But, off late, most blogs and websites are created through WordPress or PHP, and our website translators, are not comfortable with WordPress, PHP blogs. So, the translation here, might be very crude and

messy. Your entire translation work may go for a toss. Hence, ensuring that the translators that work on multiple platforms is a must.

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Expression is missed: Emotion seems to be missing when website translators are used.

Addressing a person with respect, the tone, the stature, and mood cannot be guaranteed completely while using translators. The human touch appears to be lost somewhere.

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Fear of Losing SEO Keywords: The translation of a website, can jumble up the keywords, and hence result in the key sentences or phrases being lost, resulting in lower search engine rankings. Hence improving your SEO for multiple languages plays a very important role.

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Context based translation might not happen: Every word might have several meanings or synonyms, but deducing the right meaning with reference to a context that is being written is very important. Humans can understand the context, and use the right word, while translating, where most translators fail.

So, when you want to reach out to a larger audience, and look to translate your website, you need to consider above mentioned points, and decide whether you want to invest on an expensive translator, or still go in for a trusted human translation service. To know more : beltranslation.org