Why translate a website?

Why translate a website’s content ? For some blog and/or website owners, the question of translating content arises even before the site is launched. For others, it comes later. Even though many blogs and websites today are only available in one language, it is obviously a great advantage for web users to have access to a reliable and faithful translation of the proposed content, in the language of their choice and often in their mother tongue.

What’s more, translating content for a blog or a website is now a major challenge, as is acquiring traffic, whether it’s building readership loyalty on an international scale and/or generating leads.

Why translate the content of a website ?

Even if today many people who own a blog or a website don’t think it’s necessary to translate the content of their web space, it’s clear that offering this added value to Internet users is a simple way of opening up to the international market.

When you launch a showcase site for your business activity, especially for commercial purposes in a defined geographical area that is deliberately limited because it relates to a very localised activity, you don’t necessarily think that it will be useful to offer content translated into one or more languages other than your own. The same is true when you launch a blog containing cooking recipes, or when you simply offer a few handmade physical products for sale in your online shop.

However, offering your content on your blog or website, even if it’s only in two languages, as long as that content is translated to a high standard, means widening the field of entry for many Internet users who, thanks to this translation, will have found information that they would not have found in their mother tongue and/or on a website/blog available only in their mother tongue 🙂

Offering content in several languages is therefore a significant opportunity to gain visibility and traffic, and to help make your work, ideas, texts, point of view and physical and/or digital products known on an international scale.

By translating your website into several languages:

• You give more Internet users the opportunity to understand your content, thereby broadening your potential audience.
• You can improve your website’s SEO (if, of course, you follow the relevant recommendations)
• You can promote your brand and your business more widely

The limits of the machine

Offering content in two or more languages on your website or blog is not just a matter of sending a few pieces of text here and there to machine translation machines. Machine translation has the advantage of being fast. But that’s clearly not enough when it comes to obtaining a cleanly translated web text that you can be 100% sure of the quality of.

You don’t have to be a professional translator to know that a machine translation of a text will never be as accurate or as subtle as a human translation. Even if, thanks to artificial intelligence, machine translators are becoming more and more sophisticated, it’s still clear that there’s nothing like a good translation by a human translator (and probably won’t be for a long time).

Language subtleties and other cultural differences can sometimes lead to confusion when you look at a machine translation. Often very approximate, translation by a robot translator will very often find its great limits, particularly as soon as a text becomes very specific. Take, for example, the need to translate a highly specialised technical document to be posted on your blog or website. There’s no need to gamble on the approximations that will permeate the document if it’s translated by a machine.

The same applies when a text is not technical, but highly contextual. When it is rich in metaphor, as in a novel, or full of subtleties relating to a text based on the speech and language specific to a community, as in the sometimes very hushed world of video games…

So even if the machine is now a back-up solution, no, it cannot provide a clean, 100% reliable translation. When it comes to website translation, the human touch is still the most important thing.

The case of the crude translation of content on Facebook is sometimes so enormous that even people with a beginner’s level of English will see that this system is extremely limited. In fact, most of the time it’s better not to use this translation system, as it distorts the real meaning of the content proposed.

So when you can avoid the pitfalls of the machine and make up for your own lack of knowledge of a foreign language, you might as well do it. And do it well. 🙂

Of course, humans can also make mistakes. Remember that unfortunate but amusing translation blunder when, during a visit abroad, E. Macron told the Australian Prime Minister how ‘Delicious’ his partner was? It turns out that in English, this term has a sexual connotation. This laugh-out-loud episode is a fine example of the subtleties of language we can come up against. And it proves that nothing beats the work of professional translators.

So, even for small parts of your website or blog, take the help of a professional translator to offer a good quality to your audience !

Translation is more than just textual content

We know today because we hear and read it more and more often. The video format is experiencing unprecedented growth. And while it’s obvious that offering text-based web content in several languages is a very good way of increasing visibility, traffic and potential sales, this is no less true for the video format.

If the video content is accompanied by subtitles, there’s no need to point out that offering subtitles in several languages also presents a real opportunity to win over new viewers.

BONUS TIP: For an added boost, leverage AI tools equipped with features such as AI Avatars, AI Image Generator, AI text to video, and AI Video Generator, to create dynamic multilingual video content with subtitles, amplifying your audience engagement and expand your reach. Looking for CapCut alternatives? Dive into the AI-powered tools of Veed.io for a seamless content creation experience, opening doors to new growth and success opportunities.

So here again, there’s plenty to work out about the real value of having multilingual web content to offer on your blog or website. To capture and win over an even wider audience and benefit from this new public!