Translating your online shop in 4 simple steps

The team from e-Translation Agency by Milega presents this guide to translating your online shop.

You made the decision to expand your business and sell internationally? Then you need to take care of translating your shop’s content. By following these 4 simple steps, you can speed up the process.

1. Extract the content from your online shop

First, you need to work out which content you want to translate. Normally, you should translate texts like the product descriptions, terms of service or menu items. Once you have identified the text you want to translate, you can save it in a range of formats. For instance you can export your products as a CSV file, including the product descriptions. This will save time both for you and for the translators. Don’t forget to include visual elements, like graphics, logos and banners, that contain translatable text.

2. Find out your translation options

For this kind of project, it is highly important that you choose the right translation method based on your needs. To do this, you need to know all the available options:

• Freelance translators are professionals with training and experience but generally cannot take on large volumes of work because they do not have the necessary resources. And, as they don’t have a team of project managers, they can’t guarantee comprehensive follow-up for your project.
• Translation agencies can be expensive for small projects but offer more services (e.g. SEO translation) and have more tools which speed up the work and save money on large projects. Normally, they are backed up by a team of project managers who have the tools to solve any problem that may come up during the translation process and a wide range of resources.
• Global translation companies can be expensive due to their admin costs, but this doesn’t mean better service.

3. Request a quote

So that the translation provider can establish a quote, you need to give them the following information:

• The number of words you need translated or the original file.
• The source and target languages, with all the combinations that need to be carried out (from Spanish to English and French or vice versa, from German to Russian and Polish, etc.).
• The delivery date for the project: it needs to be a concrete date and must be adhered to.
• The format of the file.

There are other good practices you should know about when requesting a quote. You can ask to sign a non-disclosure agreement at any time to ensure security, request a test translation of a maximum of 300 words to check the quality of your provider and enquire about a special rate for repetitions in order to reduce costs. Finally, don’t hesitate to give the provider instructions about the translation, given that you know best about your project and sector.

4. Integrate SEO in the translation

The most important thing to take into account is that you can’t translate keywords literally, because they are probably not the same as the most popular search words in the target country. Instead, you need to do a search with tools like Google Adwords to find equivalent keywords in your target country. This step can be carried out by you or by an SEO expert. Once you have this list of keywords, send it to the translators before they start translating.

Don’t forget that, if you need to translate your shop, at e-Translation Agency we can offer professionals who are specialised in e-commerce translation. Contact us and request a quote, with no obligation.

And don’t forget that, at e-Translation Agency, we don’t use machine translation: all our translators are professionals and native speakers of the language into which they translate.