Businesses trying to reach a multilingual audience often treat website translation as a one-time project. That's a mistake: they underestimate how much time and effort translation actually takes. If your website contains frequently updated content, or you're translating into multiple language pairs, you need a consistent process to keep translations accurate and current.
Choosing the right approach shapes the quality of your multilingual website and how easily your audience finds what they're looking for. Your options are machine translation, a CMS plug-in, or a dedicated translation platform, and each comes with its own trade-offs.
Here's how to translate a website from start to finish: which approach fits your team, and what to do once you've launched.
What does it mean to "translate a website"?
Translating a website means converting it from one language into another, usually to reach a different audience. Website translation covers the text: web content, navigation, CTAs, and web forms. Website localization goes further, adapting imagery, formatting, and the user interface for a target market.
Website translation may result in a multilingual website, in which users can toggle between multiple language options, or separate websites for each language. When translating a website, be sure to consider customer-facing content, as well as behind-the-scenes elements such as meta titles, descriptions, and alt text.
Three approaches to website translation
There are three main approaches to translating a website, each with its own set of costs, timelines, and quality control measures. Let's take a look at all three:
Machine translation only
Machine translation (MT) uses computer software to translate text from one language into another. Sometimes incorporating AI translation, machine translation has come a long way since its early days and can be used for low-stakes website content.
But relying only on machine translation can be risky: it's fast and cheap, but is more likely to contain mistranslations, cultural faux pas, and accuracy errors. Use it when deadlines or budget constraints don't allow for higher-quality translations.
CMS plugins or connectors
Translation plug-ins or connectors work directly with your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, to create and maintain multilingual content. They can help you manage language-specific versions of a webpage without having to copy-paste content between documents, and can even facilitate multilingual SEO.
CMS plugins work well for simple tech stacks, but they have limited flexibility for larger websites, especially those with more dynamic content. For multiple language pairs or complex localization projects, you may need more than a plugin can offer.
Dedicated translation platform
Dedicated translation platforms, such as Localize, provide the option of human or machine translation within the context of an automated workflow. With a cloud-based translation management system (TMS), you can use automated string extraction to queue up phrases for translation and sync them across multiple web pages.
Dedicated translation platforms usually operate on a subscription model, based on the number of words or pages translated. You can even incorporate a human review (i.e., machine translation post-editing or MTPE) to verify the accuracy of automated translations.
Choosing the right approach for your team
Deciding how to translate a website comes down to your content needs and quality requirements, as well as the resources you have available. Here's what to weigh as you choose the right approach for your team:
- Volume of content: Are you translating an entire content library, or just the main pages of your website? What about other marketing and social media content? High-volume content is a strong candidate for automatic translation.
- Update frequency: How often do you update content on your website? A simple, static website will require fewer translations than an interactive platform, such as a SaaS product, booking engine, or storefront.
- Quality requirements: Legal, medical, and educational content requires more accuracy than other types of content. Even your privacy policy may need to be translated and reviewed for legal compliance in each region.
- Available resources: How will you publish translated content to your website? Do you have sufficient developer resources to fix any issues that arise? CMS plugins are convenient, but can sometimes cause compatibility issues.
For mid-market SaaS teams, a dedicated translation platform makes the most sense. You can publish updates directly to your website without developer involvement, and supplement automatic translation with human review for quality assurance. It's more flexible than a CMS plugin, and can handle frequent, high-volume updates.
How to translate a website: step-by-step
Every website translation has its own requirements, but the steps below give you a repeatable starting point.
Step 1: Audit your site
Audit your site to determine how much material needs translating. Web content matters, but so does everything else a visitor encounters: UI elements, forms, error messages.
Prioritize landing pages and high-traffic blog posts over less-visited pages. For regionally specific content like storefronts and product pages, prioritize full website localization.
Step 2: Choose your markets
Before translating your website, choose your markets based on pipeline signals, such as product demos and lead magnet downloads. Don't assume that high traffic from a specific region will automatically translate to sales. Creating a multilingual website is more challenging than translating between a single language pair, so choose which markets to localize into first rather than trying to launch everywhere at once. (If you're not sure where to start, see our guide on how to choose which markets to localize into first.)
Step 3: Set up your translation workflow
Set up a translation workflow to keep your translations efficient. Dedicated translation platforms like Localize use string extraction to automatically identify key words and phrases and queue them up for human or machine translation.
You can also use a translation glossary to standardize taglines, slogans, and business jargon, reducing inaccurate or duplicate translations. In the same way, a style guide helps you maintain consistent tone and meaning across multiple languages.
Step 4: Translate and review
Next, translate your website using your selected method: human translation, machine translation, or machine translation plus human review. High-volume, low-risk content can be translated automatically and published immediately, while a human should always review core pages for linguistic and contextual accuracy.
Some types of content might require full localization, such as video tutorials or stock imagery. Don't forget that user-generated content, such as testimonials and product reviews, may need to be translated too.
Step 5: Implement and test
Implement your changes and perform quality assurance (QA) testing before going live. Conduct rendering checks to see how the new content appears on your website, and perform an in-context review to make sure the translation makes sense on-page.
Remember to consider layouts when translating for right-to-left languages, and update hreflang tags to reflect the language and geographic settings for your new site.
Step 6: Publish and monitor
Finally, publish your translated website and monitor SEO rankings and engagement metrics. For multilingual sites, track conversion rates by locale. Use these statistics to decide which market to launch in next, or whether to double down on your translation efforts with a complete website localization.
Download the Website Localization Playbook for a more detailed guide.
Website translation best practices
Website translations can introduce your brand to new audiences and build trust in a new locale. They can also make for embarrassing faux pas and reputational risks if you don't have quality controls in place. Follow these website translation best practices to reap the benefits without the pitfalls:
- Don't translate navigation last. UI components may stay the same from one language to the next, but their names don't. Don't wait to translate these last, because they impact everything, from URLs to page titles.
- Include meta titles, descriptions, and alt text. These key elements signal to search engines what each page is about and improve your site's accessibility.
- Use a glossary for brand terms. Brand terms and taglines can easily get lost in translation. Use a glossary to keep them consistent across languages, or update them to reflect cultural sensibilities and regional nuances.
- Never publish without in-context review. A word or phrase may be translated accurately, and still be "wrong" in the context where it appears on your site. A local expert can flag these issues before they go live.
- Consider special formatting requirements. Right-to-left languages may need modified UX elements. Other languages take up more space on the page, and may interfere with your site's layout or design.
- Treat translation as a workflow, not a one-time project. Unless your website is a static, one-time project, treat translation as a workflow you can use on multiple projects or any time you update your website for a new market.
Website translation and SEO: what you need to know
Translating your website into a different language can affect how it appears in search results. Visitors in other regions may not use the same search engines, search terms, devices, or browsers. Here are a few SEO tips to keep in mind when you translate a website to ensure discoverability in multiple regions:
- Hreflang tags: HTML tags tell a browser how to display text and other web content. Ensure your hreflang tags are set to the appropriate language and region so visitors are served the local version of your website.
- Translated URLs vs. subdomains vs. subdirectories: Once you've translated your website, you have a few URL options: a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for each region (example.es), a subdomain (es.example.com), or a subdirectory (example.com/es). A ccTLD can help establish a local presence, but subdomains and subdirectories can consolidate SEO authority.
- In-language keyword research: Conduct keyword research in each language to identify the search terms native speakers are using. These may not be the same as English-language keywords, so don't rely on direct translations.
- Indexability of translated pages: Indexability refers to how easily search engines can evaluate and store your content for use in search results. Translating your website can introduce indexing issues that affect your rankings, so use an indexability checker to look for redirects, no-index tags, and other issues.
Translating your website is step one
Translating your website is an important step, but it's only the beginning. Maintaining your website and improving your international SEO are where most teams run into friction, especially as your product evolves and new content needs localizing too. Having a strategy for what you'll do after you translate your website can make all the difference.
Localize turns website translation from an ad-hoc process into a streamlined and repeatable workflow.
