Localization Guide – How to Translate Your Website Into Different World Languages

In today‘s increasingly globalized digital landscape, having a multilingual website is more important than ever. As of January 2023, the estimated number of internet users worldwide was over 5.1 billion people – over 64% of the global population. These users speak thousands of different languages, with the top 10 languages accounting for over half of the world‘s websites.

For companies looking to expand their global reach and better serve international markets, website localization is a critical step. Localization goes beyond simple translation – it involves adapting your website‘s content, design, and functionality to meet the linguistic, cultural, and functional expectations of audiences in different locales.

By 2027, the global language services industry which provides translation, localization and interpreting services is forecast to reach a value of over $70 billion. The benefits of localization are clear – research shows that 65% of multinational enterprises believe localization is very important for increasing sales in international markets. On average, website localization can increase traffic and revenue by 47%.

However, the process of localizing a website can seem daunting, especially for development teams undertaking it for the first time. This in-depth guide will walk you through everything you need to know to successfully translate your website into different languages. Whether you‘re a solo developer or part of a large organization, you‘ll learn localization best practices and helpful tips to navigate the technical and logistical challenges.

What is Website Localization?

Website localization refers to the process of adapting an existing website to make it linguistically, culturally, and functionally appropriate for audiences in a specific locale or market. A locale represents a combination of language, region, and character encoding. For example, French speakers in Canada (fr-CA) and France (fr-FR) share the same language but have different regional dialects and cultural norms.

Localization involves much more than simply translating a website‘s textual content. A fully localized website will have:

• All user-facing text translated into the target language(s)
• Locale-specific content and imagery
• Properly formatted dates, times, numbers, and currencies
• Adapted design and layout for different text lengths and directionality
• Localized search engine optimization (SEO)
• Localized multimedia content like images, videos, and PDFs
• Functional and linguistic testing to ensure quality and usability

The goal of website localization is to make your site look and feel like it was originally created for the target locale, rather than being a secondary translated version. Up to 40% of global consumers won‘t purchase from websites in other languages, so localization can directly impact your ability to build trust and drive conversions with international audiences.

Planning for Website Localization

Before diving into the technical steps of localization, it‘s important to lay the groundwork with thorough planning and preparation. Key things to consider include:

Target locales and languages

Determine which markets, regions, and languages to prioritize for localization based on your business goals, website analytics, and market research. Consider regional language variations, dialectal differences, and locale-specific scripts.

Scope of localization

Define which website elements will be localized. This could include UI text, documentation, blog posts, marketing content, multimedia, legal policies, or even third-party content.

Localization approach

Decide whether to opt for machine translation, professional human translation, or a combination of both. Factors to weigh include content volume, available budget and resources, and quality expectations.

Timeline and budget

Establish a realistic project timeline considering dependencies like content readiness, development tasks, and translation turnaround. To estimate localization costs, determine your budget for translation, engineering, testing, and project management.

Preparing Your Website for Localization

The next step is internationalizing your website, which means architecting and engineering it to support localization into any language. Internationalization (often abbreviated as i18n) involves abstracting all localizable elements from the source code and UI.

Some key i18n best practices include:

Separating code and content

Text content should be separated from source code and placed in resource files or a content management system. This decoupling prepares strings for translation and allows you to change content without modifying code.

Externalizing UI strings

Remove hard-coded strings from your UI and move them into resource files. Use unique IDs or keys to reference each localizable string.

Using Unicode

Ensure all code files and databases are Unicode-enabled. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that supports a wide range of languages and special characters.

Allowing for text expansion

Translated text can expand up to 35% longer than the source language. Use relative sizing and dynamic layouts to accommodate longer strings without truncation or UI distortion.

Enabling bi-directional text support

For right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic and Hebrew, use CSS properties to control both text direction and UI mirroring. Apply RTL styling only when an RTL locale is detected.

Using localization libraries

Take advantage of existing open-source libraries and plugins for common development frameworks. For example, i18next for JavaScript, Django Localization for Python, or GNU gettext for PHP.

By internationalizing your website architecture from the start, you can streamline the localization process and avoid re-engineering costs down the road. It‘s much easier to launch new localized versions of a properly internationalized site.

Managing Website Translation

With your website internationalized, you‘re ready to begin the core localization phase: translating and adapting content for your target locales.

Choosing a translation management system

A translation management system (TMS) is a specialized platform for managing localization projects and facilitating collaboration between managers, developers, translators, and reviewers. A typical TMS will provide the following key features:

• Creation and management of translation projects
• Automated file import and export, including pre-processing and file filters
• Segmentation of content into translatable strings
• Distribution of translation tasks to translators and reviewers
• Online Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool with translation memory
• Terminology management and glossary tools
• Reporting and analytics on translation progress and quality

Popular enterprise TMS options include Memsource, XTM Cloud, Smartling and Transifex. There are also open-source TMS like Weblate and Zanata that may be sufficient for smaller localization projects.

Preparing translation-friendly content

Before handing off content for translation, ensure it follows writing best practices for localization:

• Use plain, concise language and avoid jargon, metaphors and slang
• Write short, complete sentences and avoid embedded clauses
• Be mindful of word choice and select terms that are easy to translate
• Provide contextual information for translators like descriptions, screenshots, and links
• Avoid using text in images, or provide the source files for localization
• Use consistent terminology and style across the site

Providing translators with a comprehensive localization style guide will help keep translations on-brand and reduce the risk of error or inconsistency. The style guide should include your brand voice, tone, and terminology, as well as language-specific conventions for grammar, punctuation and formatting.

Translation approaches

There are several approaches to translating your website content, each with different benefits and tradeoffs.

Machine translation

Machine translation (MT) uses artificial intelligence to automatically translate text. Raw MT output can be published as-is, or used as a starting point for human editing. The advantages of MT include lower costs, faster turnaround times, and scalability. However, MT quality can vary widely depending on the language pair and domain. It often struggles with nuance, ambiguity and specialized terminology.

Professional human translation

Professional linguists can provide high-quality, localized translations that adhere to your terminology and style guide. The best practice is to have one translator perform the initial translation, and a second linguist review and edit their work. To find professional freelance translators, you can use online marketplaces like Upwork, freelance directories, or language service provider (LSP) companies. Expect to pay between $0.08 to $0.20 per word for professional translation. While human translation offers better quality, it will be more expensive and slower than MT.

Post-edited machine translation

For the best of both worlds, many organizations are turning to a machine translation + post-editing (MTPE) model. With MTPE, machine-translated content is reviewed and corrected by human linguists to ensure it meets quality standards. MTPE can deliver significant time and cost savings while maintaining quality. Studies have found that human-edited MT output was judged to be indistinguishable from human translation.

Regardless of the approach you choose, implementing proper quality assurance processes is critical for translation success. This could include:

• Providing translators and reviewers with linguistic assets like glossaries, style guides and context
• Developing quality scoring rubrics to objectively assess fluency and accuracy
• Checking translations with automated quality assurance (QA) tools to catch common errors
• Conducting in-country review with native speakers to assess localization quality
• Gathering feedback from end-users and local markets

Implementing Localized Websites

After preparing localized content comes the process of integrating translations into your website. The implementation approach will depend on your website architecture and content management system (CMS). Common implementation patterns include:

Language switcher

Allow users to toggle between languages using a switcher in the header or footer navigation. The current language can be persisted using browser cookies or user settings.

Subdirectories

Host localized versions of your site on subdirectories, with URLs structured as domain.com/[language-code]/pagename. For example: domain.com/fr/contact-us

Subdomains

Use a subdomain for each locale‘s site version, with URLs like [language-code].domain.com/pagename. For example: es.domain.com/contact-us

Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs)

For a stronger geo-targeting signal, use separate ccTLDs for each target market like domain.de or domain.co.jp.

To show users the right localized version, you‘ll need a way to detect their language and geographic location. Tools like browser accept-language headers, geolocation, and IP address lookups can help determine the user‘s preferred locale.

After launching your multilingual site, it‘s important to perform linguistic, functional and UX testing with native speakers to identify any localization issues. You‘ll also need an efficient process for synchronizing translations as you update and add new content over time.

Localizing Different Website Elements

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Multilingual SEO involves optimizing each localized version of your site to rank for relevant keywords in that language and market. In addition to translating body content, you‘ll need to localize metadata like page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and XML sitemaps. Use annotations to specify the language and region of each URL. Submit your localized site versions to search console tools for each target market.

Multimedia content

Translating multimedia content like images, infographics, audio, and video will make your localized user experience feel authentic and engaging. For images, either use layers to overlay localized text or provide editable source files to designers for adaptation. For video and audio, you can burn translated subtitles directly into the media, dub the audio track, or provide captions in the target language.

Legal content

Privacy policies, terms of service and other legal content on your website should be reviewed by legal experts in your target markets. Different countries and regions will have different regulations around data protection, intellectual property, consumer rights, and more. Simply translating legal content may not be sufficient to comply with local legislation.

Measuring Localization Success

As with any business initiative, it‘s crucial to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your website localization efforts. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of your localized site versions over time, such as:

• Traffic, engagement, and conversion rates from target markets
• Search engine rankings and organic traffic for localized keywords
• Growth in international revenue and market share
• Customer satisfaction scores and localized user feedback
• Cost per word, cost per page, or cost per language
• Translation memory leverage and reuse rates
• Time to market for launching new localized content

By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can continuously optimize your localization strategy and justify further investment in new languages and markets.

Conclusion

Website localization is a powerful way to expand your business into new markets, build global brand loyalty, and drive more international conversions. But it‘s not a simple or one-time effort. Localization requires cross-functional planning, a robust technological infrastructure, and continuous collaboration between project managers, developers, translators and marketers.

By following localization best practices and investing in the right tools and processes, your organization can deliver multilingual digital experiences that resonate with diverse audiences around the world. The data speaks for itself – localized websites see 47% more traffic and revenue on average. Can your business afford not to speak your global customers‘ language?