International customers want world-class user experiences, presented in the languages they speak. But localizing your transactional website with in-house staff is painful, complicated, and comes with the following pitfalls:
- Endless workflows and ballooning costs
- Slow speed to market
- Maintaining brand consistency
- Compatibility with payment platforms
The Cost of Translation: The Price Beyond Words
Deploying and operating multilingual websites demands continuous effort and unexpected costs that go well beyond mere translation. 营销团队很少能拥有高效应对这些挑战所需的人手、技术或专业经验。
Here are just a few of the many costly burdens you and your team inherit if you bring the project in-house:
- Finding and compiling all translatable website content (such as text, images, multimedia, PDFs and more)
- Acquiring the resources to create and manage workflows to translate that content
- Processes for quality assurance and project management
- Getting content translated quickly and accurately
- Integrating the translated content into the proper global-market “instance” of your multilingual CMS
- Ensuring the translated content displays properly on-site, and doesn’t “break” page designs due to translation-related issues
- Following this complex and costly process again and again, every time you add or change content to your website
Marketing teams rarely have the staff, technologies or expertise to efficiently cope with the challenge of website translation.
Keeping Up with the Speed of Retail
B2B companies offer services or products that tend to remain consistent year-round. Their website content is generally static. But with transactional websites, especially B2C, it's a different story.
Things move fast in retail. You're often contending with ever-changing inventories due to:
- Seasonality
- Releases of new product lines
- The ebb and flow of customer demand
- 以及其他功能
With so much in flux—and with in-house translation workflows and processes often taking weeks to localize and publish new content—translated websites quickly become out-of-date.
This spells disaster for companies who want to stay relevant in global markets.
Consistency is Key
Your brand voice, messaging and overall image have been meticulously crafted to attract customers in your primary market. Ideally, this effort should carry over into global markets.
But things aren't always that simple. For translations to consistently preserve your brand's voice, you need a translator with linguistic fluency, cultural fluency-and industry-specific marketing know-how. That's a rare breed indeed. Now imagine trying to find several, to create your internal translation team.
Even if you find these unicorns, you must still consider how to apply your localized brand voice and messaging across all of your channels. From emails, to social media posts, to offline marketing, you must maintain brand consistency to give international customers the seamless online experience they demand.
You need translators with linguistic fluency, cultural fluency-and industry-specific marketing know-how. That's a rare breed.
Playing Nice with Others
Transactional websites are especially complex, from a technological perspective. Under the hood, they have an intricate ecosystem of CMSs, databases, coding and integrations with payment platforms and other solutions.
Building out a localized website means setting up solutions for identifying, capturing and uploading translated content, reconfiguring your tech stack, and hoping that it all works together.
With that many moving parts, there's so much that can go wrong. Errors during the conversion funnel will make global customers bounce, and chances are high that they won't come back.
寻找轻松的解决方案
With so much at stake, don’t use in-house resources for website translation—especially since superior solutions exist beyond your company.
Look for a digital-first website translation solution built to handle the demands of content detection, translation, and integration for transactional websites in a timely and coordinated way. 在评估可选方案时,请考虑您面临的棘手难题,并回答以下问题:
- 该解决方案是否旨在最大限度地降低内部翻译方案的运营复杂性和成本?
- 这是否是一种始终轻松便捷的一站式解决方案,由服务提供商负责提供所有人员、流程和技术?
- 它能否处理多语言网站的翻译、部署和运营,同时优化所有渠道的客户体验?
- 它能否在约一个工作日内识别、翻译、审校和发布新增内容?
- 其翻译功能能否扩展至电子邮件、产品动态推送、线下文件、社交媒体网站和其他多渠道内容?
- Can it work with any CMS, platform or programming language?
您公司能否成功实现全球扩展,取决于您是否掌握了能减轻内部团队负担的技术与方法。确保您选择的网站翻译服务提供商具备帮助您以适当的方式为海外市场提供服务的技术和专业经验。
最后更新日期:2018年1月10日