Adapting your business to local needs

Here are some tips on how you and your translators can adapt your website and ads to local markets to maximise conversions.

Basics: Internationalising and localising your website

If you’ve never adapted your website to local users, here are some basic steps:

1. Internationalise. Internationalisation is a software engineering process that separates locale-dependent content from locale-independent content on your website. For example, text, currency and images with text embedded should be separated from the logic that glues your site together, such as your site’s navigation. The goal of internationalisation is to avoid re-engineering when you enter additional markets. Once you’ve internationalised your website, you can localise it into as many languages as you need with little to no additional software development cost.
2. Localise. For most businesses, localisation means translating your website text into a new language. For others, localisation can also mean adapting an offering to the needs of a local market. For example, selling beef burgers may not work well in India, but chicken or veggie burgers may do better.

Internationalisation resources

How you internationalise your site depends on how your software is written. Here are useful links for some programming languages:

• Google Gadgets
• Java
• Microsoft .NET

Translator selection

You’ll want to find translators who can translate your website. If you don’t have employees who can help translate, you can reach out to a Google global sales specialist who can provide you with a selection of agencies or you can use Google search to find professional translation agencies and freelancers.

Keep in Mind:

1. Translation direction. Translators often work best when translating into their native language from a foreign language. For example, a Spanish native in Madrid who studied English in college is more likely to be better at translating from English into Spanish than vice versa.
2. Specialty translation. If your website has technical or other domain-specific content (e.g. you’re selling B2B software), then you should find a translator who understands the content.
3. You often get what you pay for. While machine translation is free, the quality of the translation is not yet the same as the work of a paid, professional translator.
4. Agencies or freelancers. If you’re translating into a single language, you may find a great freelancer who can translate your web content. If you’re translating into many languages, multilingual translation agencies (also called multilingual vendors or MLVs) provide project managers who offer translation expertise, the ability to coordinate amongst several in-house translators or freelancers and extra quality checks for a premium.

For more information, see our guide to localisation.

Translation Tools

Google Translate Web Element

A quick, inexpensive way to internationalise and localise your website is to embed Google Translate Web Element. Translate Web Element is free and automatically translates your website using machine translation. Learn more.

Google Translator Toolkit

If you’re working with human translators – volunteers or professionals – your translators can add that human touch to machine translation through Google Translator Toolkit. Translator Toolkit is free and allows translators to improve the first pass, machine translation provided by Google Translate, saving considerable time and money over starting translations from scratch. What’s more, Translator Toolkit supports translating websites and AdWords campaigns, so that you and your translators have a one-stop-shop for making your business global. Learn more.