Here’s the second installment of our Localization Roundup series, and we’re focusing on website localization today.
Getting a website localization right can mean the difference between, on the one hand, no traffic and wasted money, and on the other hand, those coveted hockey-stick-looking graphs on Google Analytics.
Since you probably prefer the second scenario, check out these excellent articles on doing international websites right.
The first two focus on marketing and SEO. The third article is for the geeks out there; it’s a technical description of Cloudflare’s effort to internationalize their dashboard.
How to Correctly Setup Your SEO for Different Language and Countries
Neil Patel crushes it with this article on international SEO. It’s an easy read and touches on a wide breadth of topics related to promoting your online content globally.
He gives sound advice on how to know whether you should localize your site or whether you should wait. He goes over URL structure. And he covers the best options for selecting a language for your website visitors.
And he gives advice we strongly agree with: “Use a human translation”!
In the early days he used Google Translate to translate his website and would actually recommend that method. 🤮
But I’m happy to say that he has turned from his evil ways and is now on the straight and narrow. He’s now a strong proponent of using human translators to do quality localizations of websites.
https://neilpatel.com/blog/international-seo/
Free Tool [Download]
Since you know better than to use Google Translate on your website, we’ll share this free tool with you — a Google Sheets Machine Translation Template. For the times when you just need to get the basic idea of some text (especially text in a spreadsheet column), you can use this free tool.
Get the Free Machine Translation Tool
(If you need REAL QUALITY translations on the other hand, click here instead.)
International SEO for your multilingual website: The checklist
This article covers some of the same areas as Neil’s article above. The two sections at the bottom are especially good, covering Hreflang tags and methods for switching languages.
In the middle of the article they discuss how to use machine translation with human post-editing in order to get both efficiency and quality.
Machine translation for efficiency . . .
. . . and then human post-editing to get the quality up to snuff.
https://blog.weglot.com/international-seo-multilingual-checklist/
Internationalizing the Cloudflare Dashboard
This is a fantastic article from James Culveyhouse published this week on his experience localizing the Cloudflare dashboard into several languages.
It’s a pretty technical piece, covering a lot of the same concepts as the 12 Commandments Of Software Localization article linked to from last week’s roundup. But this article covers the technical aspects of preparing software/web interfaces for translation as a chronological narrative of the author’s personal experience.
If you are looking to translate your website or software user interface, definitely read this developer’s experience.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/internationalizing-the-cloudflare-dashboard/
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That’s our roundup for this week. Leave a comment below to share any great localization or translation articles you have read lately.
