The True Cost of Translating Your Website: What You Should Consider
Alexander A.
- August 16, 2023
- 5:51 pm
Evaluating Website Translation Costs, Methods and Value
With 41% of internet users worldwide not speaking English natively, website translation unlocks major opportunities for global growth and expanded revenue streams. But accurately assessing the varying costs, processes and value involved with localizing your online presence across languages can be daunting.
This comprehensive guide thoroughly examines the pros, cons and pricing implications of different website translation methods. We’ll outline decision factors so you can determine the ideal approach matching your unique budget, needs and strategic goals. You’ll gain clarity on allocating resources to localize your web presence for maximum ROI.
Understanding the Business Case for Website Translation
While undertaking full website translation may not make sense for strictly small, local brick-and-mortar businesses, most companies today can realize significant benefits from proactively expanding their reach beyond just native English-speaking markets.
Adapting your website for two, three or more languages enables:
- Reaching Qualified Visitors from Abroad: New visitors means new leads and customers. Driving relevant foreign traffic to your site is now possible through translation.
- Building Trust and Credibility in Foreign Markets: Speaking your audience’s language establishes goodwill and shows you respect their culture. This helps persuade visitors to convert.
- Boosting International Visibility and Revenue: More languages unlocks more organic search visibility abroad. Higher visibility means increased conversions and sales from new geographies.
- Creating More Inclusive Experiences for All Users: Translation enables connecting with diverse visitors in their native tongues for greater comfort and engagement.
If capitalizing on foreign markets by selling products or services globally is a goal, then website translation should be viewed as providing the necessary foundation and catalyst for your business’s broader international success.
Now let’s do a deep dive into evaluating the available translation approaches to identify optimal solutions for cost-effectively localizing your web presence.
Machine Translation
Machine translation leverages artificial intelligence to programmatically translate text between languages. This approach powers popular free services like Google Translate and DeepL.
The main benefits of machine translation are lightning-fast turnaround given its automation, and completely free access from providers like Google. These factors make it ideal for getting translated website output at massive scale very quickly.
However, raw machine translation lacks quality control or refinement. You must manually copy and paste translated text across websites, fix inevitable errors, and handle website localization – adapting terminology and phrasing for cultural relevance. No built-in multilingual SEO capabilities are provided either.
So while machine translation delivers a gist translation instantly, expect to invest significant effort formatting, refining, and implementing the output effectively on your translated sites, which diminishes time savings.
Manual DIY Translation
Translating website content yourself or relying on your own team requires fluency in both your site’s source language and each target language. As a manual process, this quickly becomes extremely time intensive and tedious, even for smaller websites.
Doing translations in-house may seem free upfront, but the massive effort required equates to substantial hidden costs in actual staff time invested. Scalability is also severely limited based on available internal language skills. Professional-grade accuracy is unlikely unless your team includes expert linguists.
However, for very small static websites your team can successfully maintain, manual translation is an option requiring minimal technical expertise. But growth potential remains restricted given its reliance on internal human translation bandwidth.
Professional Human Translation
Hiring professional human translation services, typically translation company agencies, provides the highest-quality results but also comes with premium costs. Pricing is usually determined per word translated, ranging around 8 to 25 cents per word.
So a 10,000 word website would start at a minimum of $800 for one language direction.Multiply by additional languages and costs escalate rapidly. Ongoing expenses are also significant, as each new piece of text or content added to your site requires paying additional translation costs.
There is still significant manual project management required with human translation coordinating external resources. Professional services also lack technical capabilities for automatically publishing translated websites and optimizing them for SEO.
For small sites needing only one or two languages, this high-touch approach can make sense if quality is the top priority. But costs, overhead and content updating remain very inefficient at larger scales.
Translation Software
Robust translation software platforms like ConveyThis are purpose-built to eliminate the inherent downsides of other methods through AI. This emerging option combines the benefits of instant high-quality machine translation and professional human refinement for optimized cost efficiency and reliability.
The software first leverages AI engines like Google and DeepL to automatically translate all website text at enterprise scale, reducing costs. You then have full controls to manually refine any text or delegate to integrated professional translators for review.
Ongoing costs stay extremely low because translating additional text is handled automatically in bulk, unlike traditional per-word pricing models. And integrated SEO optimization, project management, collaboration tools and easy multilingual website publishing round out key capabilities lacking in other methods.
For most websites, this optimized blend of automation and human touch provides the best overall value, minimizing costs while still achieving high quality and flexibility.
Creating Separate Duplicate Websites
One approach is to stand up entirely new separate websites for each target language – for example, mycompany.com for English, mycompany.fr for French, etc.
While straightforward conceptually, in practice launching and maintaining duplicate sites for all languages is extremely expensive, requiring extensive development work, infrastructure and overhead. Ongoing translation syncing across sites also becomes complex and labor intensive.
Generally this only makes sense for a very small number of standalone microsites, not full websites. Otherwise, costs balloon while publishing speed slows.
Consolidating Languages on a Single Site
A vastly more efficient method is using translation software like ConveyThis that consolidates all languages onto a single website platform that dynamically delivers translated text to visitors based on their language preference.
This avoids all the bloated costs and complexity involved with launching separate infrastructure for each language. No development or engineering work is required, and sites remain easy to update and optimize with translations automatically synced.
For the vast majority of websites, consolidating multilingual content on a single tech stack using translation software offers unmatched efficiency and maintains simplicity as sites scale up.
Create social media accounts
Social media is a powerful asset for boosting your site’s credibility, driving visitors to your website, and raising brand recognition. It also provides you with an extra platform to link up with influential people around the globe, which could help you achieve a higher ranking in pertinent search engines.
Tap into the power of social media to extend your reach and engage with your audience. Sign up for accounts on platforms relevant to your sector, and use them to post interesting content and links that will be shared in your target nation. Leverage social media marketing tools to get the most out of your social media presence.
Furthermore, make sure to incorporate an array of hashtags and pinpoint the most suitable social media outlet for each post you craft. Moreover, include your website link in any posts you share so that readers can quickly reach your website for more data regarding you and your company. Consequently, this will create leads and possibly convert them into paying customers.
Conclusion
Expanding your online presence beyond just English necessitates careful evaluation of translation options and budget considerations. Creating multilingual websites cost-effectively while maintaining quality requires identifying the approach best aligned with your business goals, resources and capabilities.
For most organizations, leveraging leading-edge translation software delivers an unmatched blend of automation, quality and technical implementation at very accessible pricing compared to traditional models reliant on manual processes.
With ConveyThis, no technical expertise is required to quickly unlock a website’s global potential and engage new international visitors in their native language – a key catalyst propelling global growth. ConveyThis provides a risk-free trial for experiencing the benefits firsthand.
Ready to get started?
Translation, far more than just knowing languages, is a complex process.
By following our tips and using ConveyThis, your translated pages will resonate with your audience, feeling native to the target language.
While it demands effort, the result is rewarding. If you’re translating a website, ConveyThis can save you hours with automated machine translation.
Try ConveyThis free for 7 days!
