With the growth of internet and innovations in technology, many companies, both big and small now have unlimited opportunities to reach out to customers not only in other parts of their home country, but practically anywhere around the world. This opens doors and markets which could not have been opened even just a few years ago.
It is estimated that 1 in 5 people in the EU now purchase goods from a foreign country. This figure shows how great the potential really is and how important attaining these types of clients can be to any business owner. And an important question our clients often debate is to what extent their website should be translated and localised. Some clients may perhaps even wonder whether it’s enough to only translate the home page, or possibly, use google translate or another app which may or may not be sufficient and accurate enough for this particular task.
From our experience of working with businesses and translating their websites, translating only the home page isn’t enough. The home page of the business website usually consists of the most important information about the company, but very rarely goes into detail. A lot of the times the customer might wish to find out more about you, your products or services. Therefore, translating other sub-pages of your website can not only provide all the information and material a potential consumer might wish to find, but also portray your company as more professional, customer-focused and user-friendly website for anyone in any part of the world.
Another very important matter to remember when thinking of translating a website is localisation. Working with marketing material can sometimes be very tricky, and even the world’s largest organisations such as KFC or Pepsi can declare this to be the case as they know the effects that take place when you don’t localise slogans properly. For example, KFC’s ‘Finger licking good’ encouraged the Chinese customers to ‘Eat their fingers off’. This is the exact reason why translation applications that lack the human element and the ability localise words, although useful in some situations, should never be used for any business or professional translations, such as website translations, and professional website translation services should be used instead.
If the above arguments still haven’t convinced you, the Eurobarometer report suggests that ‘’9 in 10 internet users in the EU said that, when given a choice of languages, they always visited a website in their own language’’. Taking a good care of these potential clients in form of providing excellent and accurate translations of your website is essential in order to thrive and succeed in this globalising world.
