February is traditionally the month of love. But this doesn’t have to be just romantic love. It’s a perfect time to reflect on the things in your business you truly love.
If your website isn’t top of your list, why not? It’s your shop window for the world to discover your unique brilliance. Your key marketing essential, whether you’re a back bedroom start-up or a global conglomerate.
If you’re planning business expansion beyond home shores, an upgrade to a multilingual website is a must.
There are over 1,196,298,727 websites at the last count by Nick Huss, for Siteefy, in September 2020. Over a billion websites! And growing exponentially. Because another new website is published the second a new figure is released. That’s a lot of noise to break through online.
Therefore, it’s critical to give your business the best chance to be heard the countries you’re targeting. To be taken seriously. To look international. Even if you aren’t just yet.
That’s where a multilingual website works hard for you. But a multilingual website isn’t just about language translation. In addition to translation, localisation is also a vital component.
What is localisation? And why is it important for a multilingual website?
Think about when you see an ad that’s been produced in another country. Think about how it can look out of step. How it doesn’t resonate with you at all.
It doesn’t activate any buying triggers for you. Because it wasn’t made for you. It hasn’t been localised. That’s why it looks weird.
Localisation is the consideration of the region in which your website pages will be seen. It’s a more considered process than a straightforward copy, paste, and translate job.
3 Top localisation tips for your multilingual website
- Contact details – Contact information is written in different ways across the world. Thinks about the key pieces of contact information that need to be localised. For example, telephone numbers. International dialling codes. And the different ways addresses and postcodes are written around the globe.
- Dates – Dates, e.g. day/month/year are shown in a different order in different regions. In addition, there are 24 time zones. Do you need to take those in to consideration?
- Images – You photographs and pictures might look very ‘now’ at home. But think twice when you’re selecting multilingual website images. Poor choices might look out of place – even offensive – if you don’t carefully consider localisation.
Here at Accutranslate, we work on localised multilingual website projects with a vast range of commercial, legal and medical organisations.
We allocate website translation jobs to team members who are native speakers. Equally important, we also quality check all work to perfection. Ensuring your multilingual website conveys your messages loudly, clearly, and appropriately, to your target audiences.
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