Website Localisation

Whether you are aiming to sell products globally or simply want to cater for international visitors to your site, chances are you need your website to be multilingual. This generally is not a matter of simply translating all your content. You need your content to be consistent across languages, while presenting your brand and products in just the right, culturally sensitive way. In addition, you need to stay on top of all the technological challenges that maintaining a multilingual website involves. Let Overtaal be your partner in both respects.

Benefits of working with Overtaal

  • High-quality content that maintains your brand voice, at the lowest possible cost
  • Workflow management with professional linguists
  • Reuse of existing translated content for optimum cost efficiency
  • We are technologically savvy and can be part of the whole launch process, from working directly in xml to doing post-localisation testing, etc.
  • You remain in control

 

Finding the Right Words

In contrast to the standard translation process which aims to produce a text that matches the source language as closely as possible without changing the meaning, for certain texts the main priority should be to duplicate the impact on the target audience. A multilingual website calls for a multicultural marketing approach. Overtaal’s transcreation and copy adaptation services are all about developing the most appropriate creative solutions for target markets.

Putting it All in Context

Static images, interactive charts, and other enhanced graphical elements require special attention in the localisation process. Imagery, colours and page layout will have different connotations from culture to culture, and may need to be modified to enhance the experience of your multilingual visitors. Whether your site requires something as simple as multilingual layout / desktop publishing of text or a more detailed copy adaptation process, Overtaal has the expertise to ensure that your images and visuals fully complement your localised copy, ensuring maximum impact with your target groups.

It is no longer the case that websites can be tailored for viewing with a certain type of web browser on a screen with a certain specified resolution. Websites now need to be responsive to whether or not they are accessed from a mobile platform, whether or not the screen is touch sensitive, and to the number of pixels on the screen. But when multiple languages are involved there are yet more factors to take into account, such as the impact of typography/fonts and text flow within a limited space environment. And how will your site be affected by character languages such as Chinese or languages that read from right to left like Arabic and Hebrew?

Overtaal has the technical resources and linguistic expertise to ensure that your sites are rendered properly in other languages, including working with responsive design and character limitations (which can be a challenge since many languages expand when translated). Overtaal can help you reach any customer, in any market, using any platform to browse the web.

 
 

International SEO / SEM

In order to ensure customers can find your website via common search channels, it’s vitally important that you optimise your site by selecting the proper keywords. When you localise your site into other languages, this process must start all over again—don’t simply translate the site content and allow those translated terms to be your targeted keywords. Adapting, researching, and validating multilingual keywords in each target country or market is important, tuning in with the language actually as currently used by your target groups, including slang, misspellings, etc.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of taking steps to organically improve your site's ranking in selected keyword searches, thereby increasing the volume of traffic to your website,

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a similar though distinct field, involving purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) ads, which appear alongside search results for selected keywords. When you decide to localise your website for international markets, it is vital that the same precise linguistic and cultural knowledge applied to your source-language SEO and SEM is carried over to multilingual searches.

 

Overtaal’s SEO and SEM teams can work either independently
or in concert with our web localisation teams to ensure that you:

Millions of people worldwide search and browse the internet every day.

Translation Memories

 
According to Forrester Research

  • 87% of web visits come directly from search engines
  • 9% come from banners
  • 4% come directly from the browser

Most people, regardless of their language or culture, will only click on the top 10 results of a search. In order to maximise the ROI from your website localisation initiatives, your multilingual content must be optimised for international end-users and language-specific search engines.