The 16 Steps of Website Localization and Translation
Successful website localization involves much more than just the translation of the content. To produce high-quality, accurate and locale-specific website content, there are usually 16 standard steps involved as I’ll outline in this article. Although this process may seem a bit overwhelming at first, by following these steps, you’ll ensure that your localized websites look, sound and feel as natural and local as your English source content website.
Your language service provider (LSP) can help you with each step. The goal of this article is to provide you with a short description of website localization technology and then concisely describe each of the 16 steps.
Website Localization Technology
If you’re looking for a hands-off solution to your website translation needs, or if you’re afraid of the resulting overhead in managing a website localization project, then a proxy website translation management system may be a great fit for you. A web-based proxy system allows anyone to translate a website without the need to send files back and forth.
You simply provide the vendor with the URL of your website that you’d like to have translated, and the proxy translation management system and team of localization professionals do the rest. The system even detects changes to the source content and automatically updates the translated pages. You don’t even have to let the vendor know; it’s that simple and convenient for you!
View the below 2-minute video for additional information about proxy solutions:
Are you ready to get familiar with the 16 steps of website localization and translation? Let’s get started.
1. Conducting an Internationalization (i18n) Assessment
Your website may not have been developed with an eye towards other languages, so before it goes through translation, it should go through a step called internationalization (also known as i18n, simply because there are 18 letters between the i and the n). Sometime also referred to as globalization, internationalization is the process of designing or redesigning a product before it goes through translation so it can be adapted to various languages and locales with minimal changes during the translation process. Internationalization involves an analysis of the transportation layer, design and content / formatting.
The transportation analysis involves looking into the backend of your website to enable it to handle the various languages, language sets and many other items.
Potential design-related issues are detected during this step. Design issues can include:
Text within graphics, charts and tables that can’t be extracted for translation
Graphics that don’t contain enough space for text expansion
In addition, the website is analyzed for content and formatting issues such as:
Characters, numerals and special characters
Date and time
Currencies
Data units
Locale-specific issues such as cultural appropriateness
There are many other types of content and formatting issues to analyze, and they can vary by industry, product, company, target locale, audience and others. Your LSP can assist you in reviewing your website prior to translation, or ideally, while it’s still in the design phase.
The internationalization step will save time, money and effort down the road. For example, if you find five errors at this stage and you plan to translate your website into 10 languages, this step will save you from paying for 50 errors down the road and it will also increase your time to market.
2. Fixing the Errors After Internationalization
After the internationalization step, you should receive a detailed error report. The errors should be fixed by your team with the guidance of your LSP or an i18n consultant. If there are design issues, you should have a clear plan to address them. One of the goals of internationalization is to design with localization in mind, but if you haven’t done that at this point, you may have some issues to address.
3. Preparing the Glossary
A glossary is a list of key terms that are used frequently throughout your website, such as company product or service names, descriptions and features. It’s important to establish and translate common terms prior to the website translation step to ensure accuracy and consistency with your standard company and industry usage, which will ultimately reduce your translation costs.
The glossary can be created by you and / or your LSP. Adding definitions and context around these terms will help the translators to better understand the meaning. After the glossary has been created, it’s important that you and / or others on your team approve the terms to verify that they’re the best ones to use.
4. Multilingual Keyword Research
A multilingual and international SEO strategy, which includes using keywords strategically, is key to getting the localized websites to rank high organically in Google searches. The LSP uses your list of researched and approved English target SEO keywords, and works with their ISEO experts to transcreate the terms. From there, the process is similar to the glossary process with review cycles, updating the glossary and updating the translation memory (which is explained in Step #9 Translating the Website) in all languages.
5. Preparing the Style Guide
Most companies have some type of style guide that’s used to represent the company’s brand and vision for customer-facing content such as a website, documentation, user interfaces, products and other content. The style guide can contain details like preferred fonts, font sizes, document titles, placement and styling of figure and table callouts, naming conventions, abbreviations, acronyms and many others. A style guide should also be created for each of the target languages due to the differences and nuances of language. If you don’t have a style guide, your LSP can help you create one and the localized versions.
6. Training the Translators and Team
A key to high-quality translations is to train the key people on your LSP’s team, such as translators, reviewers, linguistic testers, the project manager and other stakeholders on your company’s products and / or services. Training ensures that your LSP’s team members understand your target audience and goals. Training can take place in many forms such as online, in person, through videos or other means, and your glossary and style guide can be good starting points. Training is an important step to delivering great translations. Your LSP can help you determine the best training approach and materials to use.
7. Translating the Glossary
After the English glossary has been approved by you and your team, the glossary is translated into the target languages and organized into a multilingual termbase. These terms are then used throughout the translation which ensures accuracy and consistency.
8. Approving the Glossary In-Country
The translated glossary should also go through an in-country approval cycle to validate the translated terms. This is a crucial step to ensure that the terms are correct and accurate for the target native-speaking audience. When the website translation begins and for future translations, the glossary terms will already be populated for the translators. Find out how your LSP ensures that translators adhere to the glossary; ideally they have a tool to address it. If you don’t have access to in-country resources, your LSP should be able to help you.
The glossary is a living asset and you or your LSP should update it as you introduce new terms, and these new terms should go through another approval cycle by you and your team and in-country reviewers.
9. Translating the Website
The actual translation can now begin. It’s important to note that the highest-quality translations are produced by native speakers of the target language and who reside in the country where the language is spoken; they’ll be the best fit for understanding the locale. And, of course, translation quality is also improved when the translators have relevant product / service and industry knowledge. Check with your LSP to learn about how they select and qualify translators.
During translation, an important asset called a translation memory (TM) is created. A TM is a repository containing all your source content and associated translated content and it’s populated with the glossary content. The more content you create, the larger your TM grows. It helps the translators work more efficiently as the TM populates content when it recognizes words. The TM will also help save you money since content is reused.
Content in graphics and embedded text also need to be translated. The internationalization step will ensure that the graphics are capable of handling the translations. In addition, any multimedia that needs to be translated, such as videos, should be made available to the LSP.
10. Proofing and Editing Translated Files
After the content is translated, it will also go through a proofing and editing step by different resources within the LSP, and not the original translator, so that there’s a new set of eyes on the project. Some resizing of graphics may need to occur in order to allow for potential text expansion.
11. Localization Testing and Reviewing Translations in Context
Once basic issues are addressed, the translations need to go through a rigorous testing process to find any issues before you deploy the website. You should work with your LSP early on in the process to develop a test plan which should cover the three main test areas: linguistic, cosmetic and functional. There are some automated tests to verify consistency with the termbase, industry terminology and within the translation itself. Spell checkers and other customizable tests can also be applied to the translations.
Ideally, your LSP will have a dedicated testing environment and staff. Testing may require special configurations, IT requirements and / or browser configurations and you want to rely on an LSP that can handle your testing needs.
After the translations are reviewed and tested, the translation should be reviewed in context by native speakers of the target languages to eliminate issues with text length, embedded text in graphics, general flow of the content and more subtle language nuances.
12. Fixing Issues Found During the Review Cycle
The localization provider will fix any issues found during the translation, testing and proofing steps.
13. Proofing the Content by In-Country Reviewers
Ideally, the same in-country reviewers who reviewed the glossary should also proofread the website for accuracy and adherence to language rules and company guidelines. This is a critical step to produce high-quality translations.
14. Fixing Issues Found by the In-Country Reviewers
The localization provider will fix any issues found by the in-country reviewers.
15. Updating the Translation Memory
Throughout each step of the process, the TM should be updated to reflect the latest changes. After the in-country review is complete, the TM is updated to reflect the last changes.
16. Releasing the Translations
With full localization complete, you can deploy the websites. When changes occur to the website, you’ll go through a smaller and quicker cycle of the steps outlined here. You should work with your LSP to determine the best change management cycle.
Conclusion
To get the most professional website translations possible, you should partner with an LSP that goes through each of the steps presented here. By following each of these steps and working together with your LSP, you should be confident in the quality and accuracy of the translations.
Whether you decide to go with the traditional website translation and localization route or potentially with a proxy website translation management solution, we’re here to answer any questions you may have. For additional information or to request a quote, please reach out to one of our global offices.
