Most online shops often start translating exclusively their main website into the languages of the countries where their customers are or where they want to have a presence.
But almost immediately they detect that buyers hope to be able to look for products in their own language. They want to be able to have reliable localised information in their local language, enabling them to know better the characteristics of the products that they wish to buy.
This makes many customers think, with tens, thousands of items in their stores, and thousands of new registrations every year, that it is too complicated a task to tackle and too costly. Really, if well focused, it is quite simple, and the costs are very low when compared to the profits. But it can hardly be approached in a traditional way, and technology plays a fundamental role in approaching a project of this magnitude.
Integration of the translation system and content manager
If you want to be successful in your e-commerce, you must integrate the system that uses the translation equipment to localise it to the different languages with the content manager (CMS). This is essential and crucial especially in the phase of translating the registration of new products, because it will allow them to be available for translation as soon as they are entered in the system and they can be put into the native language of buyers in a few hours. This integration reduces the localisation time by 30% and saves a lot of manual work, such as sending emails, entering data …
Using translation memories and glossaries.
In the e-commerce sector, where much of the content is repeated in many articles, it is essential to have an efficient translation memory system. The concept of translation memories is simple, the same sentence should never be translated twice. The system is responsible for detecting segments that have already been translated and translates them automatically. Something that seems so logical can only be done with the right technology and approaching the project right from the beginning is crucial. We must focus at first on correctly defining the glossaries and expressions of the translation memory in such a way that they are optimised for SEO; this will allow the content to be efficient from the SEO point of view when you translate new products. In some cases, the translation memory can reduce human translation work by more than 70%, which is clearly reflected in the budget.
Multilingual Marketing & Formats
An important advantage is being able to offer the weekly newsletter to your clients in their native language. Here, two important factors come into play to optimise this process.
The first is that translation tools allow us to separate the formats from the content. This will enable the translation team to focus exclusively on translating the text, and the editing tools will rewrite the newsletter in its original format but already translated completely automatically, which represents great savings in costs and time.
The second factor is to reuse translation memories to be more efficient and to maintain consistency with your website’s content.
Some interesting facts are that:
- More than 8% of retail purchases are made through Internet.
- About 75% of e-shoppers prefer to buy products and services described in their own language.
At blarlo.com, we help your e-commerce by making our teams of native translators and our technological tools available to you, aiming at facilitating integration with your work teams so that you can be more efficient reaching new audiences in a globalised world.
This post is also available in: Español (Spanish) Français (French) Nederlands (Dutch)
