Avoid Alienating Your International Website Visitors with Subpar Translation Services

Jan 2
10:53

2024

Ralph Tegtmeier

Ralph Tegtmeier

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The first paragraph of the article can be summarized as follows: Many internet marketers are adopting the strategy of providing multilingual navigation and promotional materials on their websites to broaden their customer base. However, catering to international users in their native languages is a complex task that requires more than just the basic translation services available online. If you offer subpar translation, you risk losing potential customers forever.

The Importance of Quality Translation

Linguistics and translation are complex fields that require professional handling. It's a common misconception that being fluent in your native language equates to understanding all aspects of language and its societal implications. This is far from the truth.

Moreover,Avoid Alienating Your International Website Visitors with Subpar Translation Services Articles the belief that a word-for-word translation can provide a general understanding of the source text is flawed. While this might be somewhat true in highly specialized technical fields, it's generally a risky approach. Relying on imperfect automation can exacerbate the problem.

The Pitfalls of Translation Bots

Translation bots often reflect this flawed reasoning. Their popularity, despite their shortcomings, doesn't help the situation.

For instance, consider a German website rich in textual content. When translated by a popular translation bot, the result is far from satisfactory.

Would you want your website represented in such a manner? It's important to note that a poor translation is not "better than nothing". It can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which can be more harmful than not understanding the language at all.

The Growing Importance of Internationalization

With the US dominance of the internet gradually declining, internationalization is becoming increasingly important. English is rapidly gaining ground worldwide, even in former communist states and regions previously dominated by French or Spanish.

More and more people are becoming bilingual and proficient in English, and are increasingly using US-based search engines. It's only a matter of time before even US-centric search engines will have to adapt to this trend.

The Need for Professional Translation Services

To cater to this growing international audience, it's crucial to either hire a professional translation service or have someone revamp your online content to accommodate international clients whose English proficiency may not be up to par with industry-specific jargon.

This is equally true for non-English websites. Relying on translation bots or your own non-native English skills is not advisable.

If you're targeting English-speaking clients, don't give them the impression of amateurish incompetence by refusing to acknowledge that your command of English may be less than perfect. This is nothing to be ashamed of. However, trying to cut corners in this area could be detrimental to your marketing efforts.

Here are some sites that offer translation services. Use them at your own risk:

  • Babelfish
  • [Translator](http:/ ranslator.go.com/)
  • [Dictionary](http://www.dictionary.com ranslate/)
  • Voila