The world is mulitlingual, so why does your website have only one language?

Adding more languages to your website opens it up for users speaking other languages, improves traffic to your website and makes it accessible for people who prefer their own language rather than English.

In this post, I’ll show a few advantages with translating your site to more languages, what type of translations exist and what needs to be done to make your website multilingual.

TL;DR – it’s very easy, fast and simple with Weglot.

What are the benefits of translating you website:

Well, it’s not just for your ego, translating your website has a few other advantages:

• Improve search and open up opportunities to expand search optimization – there is a lot of competition going on with English SERP’s (search engine result pages), because most of the sites are in english, but if you offer your services in other languages such as French, Russian, Spanish, German etc’, there the competition for your service is much lower, and it’s a great opportunity to be ranked higher for your offering.
• Higher accessibility – the world is a global village, making your site accessible to users from different non-english speaking countries can offer your services and products to people who haven’t yet read what you have to offer.

What types of translations are there?

Anyone who has ever used Google translate know that not all translations were created equal…
There are mainly 2 types of translations:

• Machine Translation – This is translation done by a machine (computer). No human editing or intervention. It is a very easy and fast way to translate content, but it does have it’s flaws and errors can happen, sometime embarrassing ones…
• Human Translation – Professional translation done by a translator or by ourselves. Sometimes we can use a hybrid method, where we can combine machine and human translation, I’ll talk about this below.

To reduce costs, we can apply an hybrid method, where most of the translation is done by machine and we can only make corrections (where needed) by ourselves or with the help of a professional translator.

In the not so distant past, translating a site was a lot of work. First, you needed to translate all your content, then you had to create dedicated pages for the translation or even different websites for each language. Using plugins to manage the translation was also needed and they were no so user friendly.

Enter Weglot

Weglot offers a different level of translation and translation management. Different from what we knew till now. Weglot allows fast, easy and accurate translation for our website, and offers to translate every piece of content with total control.

And with their roster of clients from the biggest companies in the world like IBM, Spotify and more, we can be rest assured that their product works.

Weglot offers support for over than 100 languages and allows centralized translation management through their control panel. You can choose between automated machine translation, manual translation or a combination of both. You can start off with automated translation and then make corrections manually. Weglot fits in with various types of content and supports page builders, woocommerce shops, sidebars, widget areas and more. You can even use a visual editor which allows to edit the translation on the pages of the site itself which makes it even easier to translate. You can also remove specific areas, pages or specific words and phrases from translation, for example if you have a name of a product which doesn’t need to be translated.

Weglot has some advanced features, for example – redirect users to their language based on the language defined in their browser. The system also works alongside SEO guidelines and sets each page with a unique URL – very important for search optimization.

Weglot was founded in 2016 and from my experience they offer great support and service.

Some examples of websites created in the studio which are now multilingual with the support of Weglot:

Compas – Israeli flamenco company – in English and Hebrew
Efrat Meiri – Architect – English, Hebrew, French, Russian, Spanish, German
DermaSpark – English, French, Farsi, Russian, Chinese

Weglot offers a free plan which supports up to 2000 words and one translated language. If you have passed 2000 words and would like to keep on translating, you will need to select one of their paid plans. If you would like to know how many words you currently have on your website, check out their word count tool.

In conclusion

Adding more languages to your website is a great way to make your site accessible to a larger audience. You can open up to new markets and boost the traffic to your website. With the latest technological advancements and AI (artificial intelligence) in the translation field, translating a site is now an easy and quick task.

If you think that translating your site will help users visiting your site, get in touch and I can help you set that up.

*I am a Weglot affiliate. Some of the links in the blog post are affiliate links which will allow me to earn a small commission.