Critical and sometimes overlooked elements of your international strategy would be the technical details that will make or break assembling your project. As important as your international approach is for your success, the technical technique of your translation project may also make or break your ability to succeed.
The following outline on website translation and localization strategy will briefly tell you about many of the more vital, and often overlooked, areas which will save you time and effort and funds before starting. Your nitty-gritty plan should include:
- A good, clean file and server management strategy.
- A very flexible site design.
- A far-sighted data management plan.
- A well-defined roadmap including milestones and budgets.
The first critical step to a prosperous technical technique is to analyze and clean up your file and server management. Having access to original site files rather than just the served files is essential. You cannot result in the necessary improvements and changes through a browser.
Take time to clean up your file naming conventions, file structure, and hosting environments. Create a system that allows for multiple versions from the site to co-exist (the translated versions) and allows for easy treatments for all the files. Make sure that this file method is in a position to grow and accommodate the number of future sites you anticipate. Better organization will greatly reward you later on along the way. Think of it by doing this, for every language, your file count will a minimum of double. The possibility of error increases exponentially.
Creating a lasting policy for the hosting and serving of one’s websites is the one other important strategical element. For most businesses, it’s adequate to host your foreign sites alongside your present source site. As your international business grows your requirement for local hosting will even grow. Your search engine ranking will even be suffering from these choices.
Once your server file management is organized, the next investment is to check your site design for localization issues. Translated text with either shrink or grow around 30% concerning the target language. Determine if your graphics are going to need to be re-sized or converted into a different format; preferably one-way links. Look at dynamic content served on your site.
Is your design going break when the translated text is served? What if one of your respective target languages is Arabic or Asian? Is your site design capable of the display directly to the left text?
Speaking of dynamic content, maybe you have a plan for your dynamic content to get translated. This includes external data sources such as news and blog feeds and also internal data sources. If your site uses data tables it’s critical to have a technique to manage your data within the tables. Similar to your server file management, your computer data tables are certain to get unmanageable as you increase the languages if you don’t have a good data strategy.
Included within certain data strategies are website cms. Many different systems exist, but each handles multiple languages differently. Spend the time to look into the best solution to your particular company needs.
What form of global gateway might you serve your site though? Easy navigation for your foreign visitors is the first impression you are going to provide and can sometimes become a critical element in business energy. You never have a second possibility to create a good first impression. Many different options are open to direct any visitors to the translated versions of your site. You will have to pick the right the one which fits from the needs of your respective site.
Finally, you need to define your ability to succeed milestones. Before you advance into that actual procedure for translating and localizing your site you should possess a budget and timeline defined. After mapping your international and technical strategies a project budget and timeline should fall naturally into place. Know how much you’re going to spend as well as what and just how long it can be going to take are critical questions you have to be able to answer.
Succeeding in international customers is extremely rewarding as long when you have the proper methods to guide you. Many different resources can be purchased on the Internet. Search around or ask your language provider to assist you to write your localization strategy. Taking enough time to think this through will give you the building blocks essential to make most of your international efforts.
In subsequent articles, we will begin to set the project together and start the specific translation processes.
