From simple, personal accounts to huge, income-generating sites, blogs have come a long way. Who would have thought, just a couple of decades ago, that blogging would be able to deliver not just a full time income but a life-changing amount of wealth?
Ok, so the majority of blogs don’t generate those life-changing sums, but the fact that some do means that blogging is a pastime that’s packed with potential. Understanding monetization is key to maximizing this potential, and translating your blog into other languages can play an important role in this.
If you’ve never worked with a translator before, don’t worry. We’ll walk you through how to find the best translation services for your blog, so that you can reach out and connect with new audiences, whether at home or overseas. Who knows, perhaps this could be the start of your blog growing from a part-time hobby to a major international revenue generation machine.
Find Out Which Languages Are Best for Translation
It’s not been an easy couple of years for businesses. Not by a long way. The economic impact of the pandemic has been huge, and now supply chain issues are exacerbating many companies’ woes.
Blogs can be impacted by global economic fluctuations just as other businesses can. Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes translation services, advises businesses – blogs included – to bear this in mind when thinking about which markets they want to expand into, and thus which languages they will need.
At the core of this is the fact that if the product you offer doesn’t speak to the demographic in the new language, investing in translation services alone won’t pay off in the long run. For instance, if you offer a local service for landscaping and there is not a large Spanish-speaking population in your area, it doesn’t make sense to translate your landscaping blog into Spanish!
There are various questions to consider when working out which languages are worth translating your blog into. If you offer a service in a certain locale, for example, which languages are spoken within the area in which you work? You can often find out this information from language maps or local governmental sources, like census pages.
If you have a very active second or third language in the area, that could mean reaching more customers and showing you care enough to learn their language. In these instances, the language you use will vary from state to state. Mapping languages in the US, for example, shows that German translation would work well in many areas.
Next, consider whether your blog covers topics that are of interest to people in other markets. A blog covering a local sports team might not have much reach outside of its original area, for instance.
If your blog offers a product, on the other hand, consider whether you have the internal resources to sell that product in other countries or markets. You’ll need to determine if that product has demand in the target language if it is legal to sell in that area, if you have the set-up to navigate between different currencies and whether your company can provide appropriate customer service in that region.
Your website’s analytics tools may provide some answers here. You can find out which regions viewers are from and which languages they are viewing the website to better assess your translation need.
Use Professional Translation Services
Once you’ve done the hard work of narrowing down which language you want to translate your blog into, it’s time for the actual translation.
If you’ve been running your blog for years and wish to translate all of your content, this will be no small task. It’s good practice to update a blog anywhere from three to 15 times per month, so as well as having quite a back catalog of content, you’ll also need to put plans in place to translate updates regularly.
It might be tempting to use digital tools for language translation services, especially since many blogging platforms come with translation tools and plugins. However, it’s often all too apparent when a site has been haphazardly thrown into a digital translation tool. The language can feel stilted, idioms don’t quite translate and you can find some truly comical errors.
As such, it pays to invest in translation services that will keep your site sounding just how it should, no matter which language the reader is viewing it in. This is especially important for blogs since blogs tend to be a bit more informal in their style and tone. They can contain more metaphors, direct cultural references, and slang – even in some business blogs – so that they better connect with their customers through a more casual format. These elements are harder for machine translation to handle, so decent human translators can make sure these linguistic elements are transferred into the new language.
Adapt Your Blog to Meet Local Expectations
It’s not enough to simply translate the text of your blog. You should also keep an eye on how well the content suits the new readers that you’re aiming for. Making sure a blog (or website, or other product) fits a specific locale or market is just as important as the words you use to connect with that market. Yes, translation is part of that process, but you may also need to update graphics, adjust the layout of the website to fit the new language, and convert content to local needs, such as new currency signs and measurements. You might also need to undertake tasks as diverse as updating contact information so that it meets local formats and making sure a product meets local legal requirements.
With all these working parts, it’s important to keep in mind that adjusting a blog for another market doesn’t just stop with the copy. The whole site, including the graphic overlay, may need to be updated to fit with the cultural expectations of the target audience.
A reputable translation service can help with all of this, so check with all of the translation services you’re considering working with to see how they handle these aspects of the process. .
Quality Checks for Translation Services
You should make sure your newly translated blog undergoes some form of quality check. Translation services may provide this step, with a second linguist checking over the completed product, so be sure to check this when considering which translation agency to appoint.
You might also want someone internally to look over the new blog content if you have someone who natively speaks the language you are translating into. Alternatively, you can source beta testers to make sure the website navigates and reads well.
Making a Website Easier for Translation Services
While you’re writing your blog content, you may want to keep a few tips in mind that make the blog easier to translate further down the road. These can reduce headaches for translation professionals, move the blog through the translation process faster, and reduce time in testing.
While you shouldn’t sacrifice the overall quality of your blog as you write, some points to keep in mind for a multilingual blog include:
- Keep sentences short and avoid too much obscure vocabulary that could be hard to translate.
- Since your blog is for multiple markets, avoid references that only local people would understand, like mentioning local athletes or political figures.
- Watch out for cultural idioms, like “a dime a dozen” or “pulling someone’s leg,” which can be tricky to translate directly.
Following simple rules like these should help with the overall translation process and ensure that your blog resonates beautifully with its target audience(s).