How To Ensure A Good Blog Translation?
Although blog translation is an important part of a website localization project, it is sometimes overlooked and left out due to the limited budget or the effort it requires. In fact, a blog brings several benefits that can boost your website traffic, generate new leads or share your knowledge of the industry. With these undeniable advantages, it is worth investing time and money in translating your company’s blog while localizing your company’s website.
In today’s post, we will discuss the importance of blog translation and what you need to do to achieve high-quality translations for your company’s blogs.
Why Do You Need To Translate Your Blog?
Blogging can take a great deal of time and require the commitment of your company. However, all the efforts are worthwhile as blogging is an integral part of your company’s online content marketing strategy. Having a website blog with quality content helps you achieve numerous business goals. Below are the two most important ones that your company should bear in mind while building and translating your company’s blogs.
1. Drive traffic to your website
For every new blog you write, you add one more indexed page on your website which helps increase the chance that your company’s website shows up in the search engines and be clicked by your potential audiences. By having insightful and well-written articles that include related keywords, images, or videos, your company can generate more organic traffic to your website.
Research shows that about 72.1% of internet users prefer to surf websites translated into their native language. Undoubtedly, when entering a new foreign market, having a good blog page gives you a huge advantage of being found and clicked.
Source gif: ahrefs
However, what bothers most companies is the cost and time it takes to build a blog page. Creating completely new blog articles for your new localized website requires a new team of native content creators and months of writing and creating content which can be really costly and timely, making it a less desirable choice.
Luckily, there is a more economical solution that can bring the same expected results – blog translations. You can make use of your current blog posts with the help of native linguists to translate them into the target language.
What’s more, each country has a different habit of using search engines. For instance, Chinese people search information on Baidu – the search engine that is specially made for the Chinese. As a result, if you want your blog post to show up in the search results, it has to contain Chinese keywords throughout the post.
2. Show your company’s knowledge of the industry
Blogs are a great platform for your company to share your in-depth knowledge of the industry and market your company’s expertise and skills for your services or products. Besides creating a professional image for your company, the insights you provide on your website leaves a good impression on the readers’ mind and build their trust in your business that you can offer them high-quality solutions to meet their demands.
However, all the efforts might go to waste because of language barriers. Not every potential customer can speak English or your native language to understand the knowledge you share. Even if they do, difficult terms used in the posts can deprive them of digging deeper into your industry, products or services.
To avoid such troubles and be more persuasive, consider translating this information into the target market’s language. Well-translated blog content guarantees your target audiences understand well and accurately the related information of your services and products. In other words, good blog translations give you a higher opportunity to persuade potential customers into using your services or products.
What Needs To Be Translated To Ensure A Good Blog Translation?
1. Content Translation
As your blog provides readers with information about your company’s products and services as well as the industry in general, a lot of terminologies are used. Thus, the content needs handling by professional translators with a good background of the related industry to guarantee the accuracy of the blog translations. Your company can prepare a list of glossary including terminologies and how you wanted them to be translated which help save time for translators while enhancing the translation’s consistency.
The translators should also extra attention to the tones and emotions of the articles, which contribute to creating a consistent brand voice for your company.
2. SEO-relating features
Content blog translation might not be enough to optimize your company’s content and online presence in an overseas market. It only fulfils one of many goals of a blog – giving audiences knowledge of your company’s products or services while neglecting an important purpose – generating more organic website traffic. That’s why you need to take a step further to handle SEO-relating factors.
It is worth noting that a term, object, or event can be described by several different words in a language. Thus, the literal translation of keywords from the source language to the target language might not bring a desirable result.
For example, assuming you own a dental website with an English blog post using the term “orthodontics” and want to translate it into Vietnamese. The official translation of “orthodontics” in Vietnamese is “chỉnh nha“. The translation is correct, unfortunately, according to SEMrush – a keyword research tool, the monthly search volume of this term is quite low, at around 600. Meanwhile, “niềng răng” – a more casual term with similar meaning has over 18,000 monthly searches. Needless to say, to balance between accuracy and SEO, “niềng răng” is the right choice for the blog translation in this case.
SEO factors that your company should pay close attention to during the blog translation process:
- Translating main and sub-keywords of the article is not enough, your company should conduct keyword research in the target language to make sure you have used optimized ones to gain visibility of your website when customers search such information in their target language.
- You should also pay attention to translate the meta description which is used to summarize the web page’s content. Search engines use this summary to inform visitors about the overall content of the page before they decide to click on it or not. Therefore, translating content in this tag is a great way to increase user click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs).
Who Should Get Involved in The Blog Translation Process?
We recommend the following resources to get involved in the process to guarantee the best quality for your project:
- Professional linguists – To guarantee the accuracy and smoothness of a translated blog article, you need experienced native translators and editors (and maybe proofreaders) who speak fluently the language and understand the cultural nuances to avoid any misunderstandings or culture conflicts.
- SEO experts – As mentioned, doing keyword research is an integral part of the blog translation process. This should be conducted by a Marketing expert who has experience in SEO and good insights into a particular search engine.
- Internal team experts – The final translation should be reviewed by internal native team experts because, in the end, the internal subject-matter experts are the ones who understand the company’s services and products the most. They can make changes in word choices or terminologies to guarantee the final translations are accurate, easy to read, and ready to publish.
As you see, a successful blog translation project requires cooperation from several positions and team members, both internally and externally. To achieve a cost-effective blog translation project, your company should consider working with a professional translation agency that offers a team of both experienced native translators and SEO experts to handle the blog translation. What’s more, it is ideal to have an internal validation by native team experts from your own company.
