Answering the question in the title could be as trivial as citing the 2021 study highlighting how more than 4 billion people around the world use the Internet. What the network opens to companies is the largest market that has ever existed, practically the entire planet - and it is a planet that speaks many different languages, and therefore also forces companies to learn to speak in different languages.
But let's not limit ourselves to the obvious, and reflect on the question in more depth: "how" should we translate our company's website? How can we operate so that the necessary investment gives us maximum results?
One of the first fundamental aspects to analyze when reflecting on the translation of a website is the purpose for which this is carried out: beyond the advantages in corporate image - which are now minimal given that the ability to interface with customers all over the world is today, rightly, taken for granted - a company speaks different languages in order to be found by new customers on international markets.
Far from being a trivial concept, this criterion instead informs many choices at the level of the translation of the content on a website. The first is - and we talked about in another article (https://www.bantelmann-translate.de/en/blog/post/126/international-markets-special-feature-which-languages-should-corporate-materials-be-translated-into) the decision of the languages in which to present oneself: and it is a fundamental decision, because it must reflect an analysis of the markets of actual interest to the company. But in addition to this, the desire to be found and contacted by customers requires a translation not only carried out correctly from a grammatical and technical point of view, of course, but also carried out according to search engine optimization criteria, and therefore planned in the choice of terms and concepts to achieve objectives that may be different from those of the original version.
In translating the content of a website, it is necessary to acquire an internationalization perspective, which only a translation professional - who is thoroughly familiar with the culture of the target languages - can provide.
This type of approach makes it possible to ensure that the contents are written taking into account the particular and specific sensitivities and points of view of each different culture to which it is addressed, revising the details of the text - if necessary even with an actual transcreation (https://www.bantelmann-translate.de/en/blog/post/131/what-does-a-translation-need-to-be-effective-in-foreign-markets) - to be able to convey the desired meanings while maintaining the message’s effectiveness.
Probably the most important concept in preparing the translations of a website is framing the work in a localization perspective (https://www.bantelmann-translate.de/en/localisation). Localization is a particular aspect of translation, which has to do with the development of a site to accept configurations and data formats that are typical of the country in which the language is being translated, so as to make the site easily usable for local users not only at the level of information acquisition, but also of interaction with the site itself. This therefore includes the adaptation of fields and data relating to date, time, units of measurement and currencies, but also the design of spaces relating to the text to take into account the difference in size between two identical contents written in different languages.
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