Understanding how to translate your eCommerce store to sell worldwide is vital whether you’re running a tiny local business or a massive one on WooCommerce, Shopify, or BigCommerce.
Since practically everyone has access to the Internet, any online store, in theory, can sell to anyone on the globe. The difficulty in converting these customers, however, remains.
According to research on multilingualism and localization practices, most consumers (73%) would instead buy from a company whose website is written in their native tongue. This finding explains why many online stores use translation services to increase sales.
With that in mind, this piece will demonstrate the precise steps necessary to translate your online shop into another language.
Focus More on Localization And Not Translation
More than just translation is required to have a fully functional multilingual version of an online store. You may expect customers from all over the world to visit your multilingual eCommerce site. Use the content on your website to strike up a conversation and establish rapport with your visitors.
Localization, not translation, is the key to establishing this rapport.
To put it simply, localization gives a website the appearance of being built from the ground up to cater to users in a specific country or language.
Attract and keep customers in the countries you’re trying to break into by using culturally relevant images. Also, you can display prices in the local currency, use product names commonly used in those countries, and design your website according to the layout standards of the language you’re translating into.
You can take localization a step further by examining what features of the app’s functionality should be updated.
Among US consumers, it is common practice to request a zip code in a contact form; in Germany, however, this is not the case. Therefore, a zip code box could lead to fewer conversions if it needs to be clarified for the site’s German users.
When making a website available in many languages, localization rather than translation should be your primary focus.
Think About SEO Localization to Get More Organic Traffic
An online shop localized in French or German is its entity. Attracting free, organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu will require a focused approach.
Your multilingual website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can benefit greatly from your efforts during translation.
Ensure you have a list of keywords ready to bring in the proper customers for your website’s iterations. As a first step, you can list the names of your most popular products or the categories under which they fall.
Put up a request for your translators to appropriately render these terms depending on their relative search volume. The translation may be accurate but needs to reflect how your target market searches for things online.
Pick a Translation Software That’ll Save You Time and Effort
You may find a wide variety of translation-related programs, plugins, and tools out there.
But it must work with your CMS, support your languages, and simplify the translation process.
There are two ways to read a language: right-to-left and left-to-right. Unlike Arabic, which is written from right to left, French is written from left to right. The guidelines also apply to the respective language’s online presence structure. Arabic menus should therefore align to the right, and paragraphs should be formatted similarly.
If the software you use doesn’t support your language, you’ll have to put in a lot of extra time and effort to adjust the visual style of the translated website.
The translation software you use should also be able to communicate with your CMS to oversee the translation project more. Make sure the translation app is compatible with Shopify if that was used to create the online shop.
Keep Away From Automated Translation
You develop a multilingual eCommerce website for increased success in selling to customers in other countries.
The language and words your visitors read on your website should make sense to them. Your site’s content needs to be original and relevant to attract visitors.
Machine translations are not capable of facilitating this level of conversation. Google Translate and other machine translation technologies have come a long way in recent years, but they still benefit greatly from human review and correction.
Google warns in its guidelines that websites using automated translations that a human translator has not verified may be penalized.
Get Help With Your Translation Needs From A Professional Service
As you can see, numerous moving parts are involved in translating your online store’s website. Employ a translation firm with experience managing and integrating these many elements, just like Espresso Translations.
If you need help translating your website, especially your online store, find a company that knows the ins and outs of the process.
