If you’re not translating your content, you’re not reaching all potential customers.
Even though non-native prospects might speak more than one language, they often prefer consuming content in their native language. It’s less effort and means they have a better experience.
Content is more findable too, because, guess what: people search for information, products, and more in their mother tongue. Even Google recommends you create content in more than one language:
| Tips from Google: content producers should consider multilingual searchers. “We encourage publishers in areas where several languages are commonly used to make content in those different languages rather than in just one that is widely understood. People appreciate content written in their preferred languages, and Google itself would like to show it when it is available.” |
With this in mind, let’s take a look at what you can expect to gain when you translate your content.
Which content should you translate?
OK, before we jump into what content to translate, you should know that translating your content is not enough.
You also need to localize your content if you truly want it to resonate in new markets.
| ❓What’s content localization? Content localization is the process of adapting content so it resonates with different markets. Instead of just adapting language (e.g., English to French), localization also involves changing cultural references, humor, design, and experiences (like the payment process) to make everything feel just right. |
With this in mind, here are the most popular types of content you can (and should) translate and localize:
Web pages: Home pages, landing pages, blog posts, and product pages
Social media posts: X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook content
Marketing emails: Welcome emails, sales, and product announcements
Support pages: Customer service documentation, FAQs, and help pages
Lead magnets: PDFs, guides, checklists, and ebooks
The list could go on, and the longer it gets the more headaches you’ll have managing it all. Imagine if you’re translating content into 5 or more languages!
How do you stay on top of content translation while managing other everyday tasks? We’ll answer this in the next section.
How to manage content translation
While it may seem like a lot of work to translate every kind of content, content translation software helps you stay organized so you can multiply your efforts and convert your entire content library to your target languages with ease.
| 💡Just like content management systems, there is content translation software to help you manage multilingual content and streamline your translation process. |
Translation management software includes translation, content delivery, project management, data analysis, and reporting.
Rather than translating every single piece of content manually, content managers can use translation software to streamline and automate a large part of the process, giving you the biggest return on your content efforts.
Here are three benefits of leveraging content translation software:
1. Streamlined translation process
Let’s face it: translating content takes a lot of time if you’re doing it manually.
Trying to manually translate every piece of content, let alone keep track of your content, and trying to manage thousands of files is no easy task.
Translation software can help you manage files, automate your translation process, and manage your entire library of content in one place.
Lokalise integrations with Webflow, Storyblok, contentful, Hubspot and WordPress mean no matter where you store your content, you can automatically import and export content to translate without having to copy and paste it.
Maria Britze, Influencer and localization strategist, has seen first-hand how much faster it is when you automate localization processes.
“The pull and push features that you have, those are just incredibly handy, because I work a lot in content marketing localization. So whenever I have text, visuals, and design elements coming together, being able to push and pull translations just increases speed incredibly because I do not have to copy and paste all the translations singularly like it was in the past.”
2. Consistency across your brand voice
If you aren’t using translation software, you’re going to struggle to stay consistent with your branding.
For example, without a translation tool, you’ll struggle to ensure your translations are congruent with your marketing materials. Since different languages require more or fewer words to express a thought, it’s challenging to keep messages and wording across content if you’re checking it manually.
Plus, you may find that different languages require different words for different situations. If you translate hundreds of pieces of content and then find out that you translated something wrong, how do you know which pieces you need to fix?
A content translation tool can help you manage your content and automate the editing process to maintain consistency and save time.
Lokalise lets you add glossaries and style guides for each language, giving translators access to them. Whether human or AI, this helps stay consistent with brand names, slogans, and other untranslatables, across all content.
3. Improve team collaboration
If you’re working in a team environment, you need to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to translating your content.
Your project managers, designers, copywriters, and developers need to know what the processes and rules are when it comes to translation.
A content translation platform can help everyone collaborate with ease. You can set different users, permissions, and functionality per user so everyone can work in harmony on one tool.
Lokalise Integrations with tools like Figma, GitHub, Webflow, and Storyblok let you work alongside developers, designers, and translators, making it easier to collaborate on projects.
How to measure the results of content translation
Translating content is a key part of building an international brand and reaching your growth potential, but you also need to measure the results of content translation to justify the effort you out into content translation. Here are some key metrics you should consider including in your reports once you’ve translated your content:
1. Audience growth
Do you know Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson)?
He’s arguably the most successful YouTuber of all time.
In the past few years, Mr. Beast has begun translating his videos by adding language tracks.
He realized that a massive segment of YouTube doesn’t speak English and that he was missing out on a large potential market.
Whether you work in video content like Mr. Beast, or you work in ecommerce, you need to translate your content into different languages if you want to reach a wider audience.
2. Organic traffic
Every time you translate a piece of content into a new language, you’re doubling up your search engine optimization efforts.
The reality is that the majority of the world doesn’t speak English. They’re not typing English words into their favorite search engine. They’re typing in their local language.
If you want to get more organic traffic from different search engines, you need to rank in different languages — and this will only happen if you write content in different languages.
3. Customer satisfaction
Have you ever visited a website only to be frustrated that it was in a different language?
It’s not a fun experience.
And, built-in browser translation tools rarely ever translate accurately. It makes for a clunky and poor user experience.
Translating content into different languages gives your audience a better experience, which means they’ll want to come back for more.
4. Content value
If you can write one piece of content in English that indirectly leads to $5,000 in sales, imagine if you’d simply translated that same piece of content into four more languages.
Imagine multiplying your revenue to $25,000 by simply translating that one piece of content.
By translating your content into more than just its original language, you get a bigger bang for your buck. Rather than always creating new content to reach new potential customers, just translate a single piece of content to get a greater reach (and ROI).
5. Global reach
Translating content into different languages gives you a competitive advantage over strictly monolingual businesses.
For example, English is the most popular language in the world, but only 1.45 billion people speak English fluently.
If you combine the next three most popular languages, Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, you have an audience of 2.28 billion, nearly twice as large as the English population.
If you aren’t translating your content into other popular languages, you’re stunting your ability to reach a global market.
6. Brand engagement and reputation
Remember when I mentioned how it creates a poor user experience when you visit a website but it’s not in your native language?
Well, that kind of thing leads to a negative brand experience, too.
If you create enough of those, it’ll lead to a negative brand reputation.
On the other hand, if you do your best to translate and localize your content for different languages and regions, you can improve your brand reputation and be known for being accessible and inclusive to other cultures.
3 benefits content translation software can bring to your team
How to translate content with the right strategies
Ready to start translating content?
Before you dive into a platform, here are a few tips to get the most out of your process:
1. Pick the right content translation software
Every content translation software is unique and comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
You need to make sure you research different types of software to ensure it aligns with your brand, your goals, and your team.
Here are a few ways Lokalise can help content marketers:
- Doesn’t require developer-level knowledge to use effectively
- Support for machine, AI, and human translation
- Wide file and integration support for Webflow, WordPress, HubSpot, Storyblok, and more
- Strong collaborative features to help content managers guide translators, editors, and designers
- Built-in quality assurance and style guide
- Built-in glossary to keep track of specific terms in each language
- Translation memory automatically saves translations for future use
- Easily translate long-form content by paragraph, heading, and more
2. Adapt content to fit specific SEO needs
Search engine optimization is one of the core pillars of a successful content marketing strategy. But did you know that Google and Bing aren’t always the top choices for every country worldwide?
For example, in South Korea, Naver is popular. In China, Baidu is commonly used to search.
You should ensure you align your SEO with these different search engines to reach the most people.
Additionally, you should follow technical SEO best practices. One thing you should consider is using a subdomain to reach different regions. For example, if you’re reaching a Singapore audience, should you create a sg.website.com or website.com.sg?
3. Create a translation manager role
The only way to succeed with content translation is to ensure someone takes initiative and leads the way. Whether it’s you (as content manager) or another team member, you need someone in charge who can be responsible for the success of your translation efforts.
Once you have someone in charge, you may want to create a whole translation team, depending on how big your company is.
Once you have your content translation manager and team, it’s time to onboard members.
Talk with your content team — your writers, designers, video editors, project managers, and any other people on your team. Create a set of protocols and processes to follow. Then, create proper training and resources to get people up to speed.
4. Don’t forget about localization
Translation isn’t the only way to reach new audiences.
Content managers also need to consider localizing their content to ensure it resonates with people in different regions and cultures.
Caroline Ren, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Webflow said:
The key thing to remember is translation is just one small sliver of localization. It’s really important to get it right. It can be anything from content to imagery to the people depicted and lifestyle photography. If you have UI shots, make sure that the text is translated. Design, different regions have different preferences for design. You’re going to get a lot better engagement if you’re following those like regional guidelines.
For example, it wouldn’t sit right if McDonald’s came out with a new bacon sandwich and started promoting it across all websites to all countries.
Why?
Some cultures don’t eat pork. So, you could imagine McDonald’s customers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (where pork is illegal) wouldn’t have a positive reaction.
On a more cheerful note, and a boost to personalization and brand reputation, you may want to implement a Chinese New Year message for your Chinese audience at the end of January or in early February when the new year begins.
Knowing your audience inside and out will ensure you can craft content that speaks your audience’s language and is localized to their tastes.
“If you’re really wanting to have a robust localization strategy that drives conversions and drives leads for your sales team, you need to really deeply understand the locale and the audience that you’re targeting beyond just having a good translator or a really good translation tool,” said Caroline.
Reach new audiences with Lokalise today
If you want to grow your international audience, improve your brand reputation, and compete globally, you need to ensure you’re translating your content.
A content translator can help you streamline your ability to translate and personalize your content so you can get the best return on investment for your content creation efforts.
Ready to transform your content marketing strategy?
Lokalise can help you bring your content to an international audience.
With Lokalise, you can:
- Translate blogs, web pages, sales decks, social media content, and more
- Create consistent experiences with a translation glossary and style guides
- Localize content without relying on developers for localization support
Get started with Lokalise’s 14-day free trial now.
