When expanding a business into global markets, translating your website into other languages is a necessity. However, since there are various ways to manage and develop a multilingual website, it can be challenging to know how to begin.
One of the first decisions to make with multilingual website translation is how to set up the website’s infrastructure to ensure that the translation is seamless, efficient, and accurate.
Here we look at the two best options to facilitate website translation – translation proxy solution and content management system (CMS) integration. Each one has pros and cons that can impact the site’s performance; therefore, discussing the possibilities with a language services provider will ensure that the best choice for the business is selected.
Pros and Cons of the Translation Proxy Solution
Translation proxies are servers that operate between the original website and the end user to ensure that content gets translated based on the user’s region and domain. Ultimately, proxies add a translation layer on the primary website that taps into a previously created translation memory. As such, each time an international visitor enters your site, the source content is translated into the visitor’s native language. When new information is added to the source website, the proxy automatically identifies it and translates it, making it an efficient way to attract global customers.
Depending on the company’s needs, proxies offer many advantages, including:
- Translations can be accomplished without extra quality assurance steps, making the translation process more affordable and quicker than with CMS integration.
- Proxies are especially effective for mostly static websites that do not require many revisions to their design or functionality, again making it cost-effective and efficient.
- Translation proxies are relatively easy to implement, making them a viable means to test a new international market strategy before choosing to go with a more costly translation method.
- With translation proxies, you do not have to provide your LSP with styling requirements, source files, or many instructions, further simplifying the process.
Along with the pros, there are a number of cons with proxies, including:
- Because the website content is essentially static, the method is ineffective for sites that require updates to product recommendations, as well as personalization and dynamic content.
- Proxies can get pricier than anticipated when they are used for locations that require even slightly different content.
- The translation layer might fail to translate some content, resulting in the end user seeing a combination of languages.
- With this solution, companies ultimately surrender control of their website to a third-party service; as such, if the service provider’s server has performance issues or experiences downtime, the website will be adversely affected.
Pros and Cons of Content Management System Integration
An approach that is gaining popularity for managing the translation process is the implementation of CMS integration, which facilitates the process of sending the source content to the LSP’s translation management system, then back to the company’s server.
CMS integration solution has several advantages, such as:
- CMS gives much greater flexibility with the translation, including tone of voice, layouts, color changes, style, and glossaries that should be used during the translation process. In addition, the client is able to revise the content as needed on their server before and after the website goes live.
- CMS integration allows multiple teams in various regions to collaborate on website localization
- With an integrated CMS approach, a business can implement a complete marketing strategy, because it can create unique content for each target location, then upload it to CMS.
- A CMS solution ensures that businesses can keep their websites current with the most updated technology, including new video and file formats, functionality, and apps.
As with translation proxy, CMS integration has downsides, including:
- CMS integration can be costly compared to a proxy-based solution, particularly because of the expense to configure, design, and manage the process of moving content from one server to the other.
- With CMS integration, managing complex multilingual websites can become an inefficient and manual process. As such, the content on these various sites can become out of sync with each other.
- Many large businesses regularly publish new content on their original website, which can cause errors on the global sites, especially since many content management systems do not automatically notify translators and website managers of the changes that were made.
- The process to fix errors can be expensive and arduous, particularly because CMS integration might require many quality assurance
Website localization can seem daunting, but making the best decisions from the onset can ensure that the project is a success. By partnering with an LSP, you can select the right infrastructure for your multilingual website that will ultimately help drive countless new customers from across the globe to your business.
Summary
One of the most important decisions to make for website localization is how to best manage more than one international website. A significant part of that decision is choosing between two infrastructure options – translation proxy solution and content management system (CMS) integration.
