Windmill Strategy

Website Internationalization and Translation Options for B2B Industrial and Manufacturing Companies

Windmill Strategy
B2B Website Internationalization and Translation Options

Many B2B industrial and manufacturing companies reach global audiences through their complex products and services.  The need for effective website internationalization techniques is increasingly important for any organization wanting to reach new audiences with their existing websites in their target market.

Table of Contents

What is Website Internationalization and Translation?

Website internationalization is a broader term used to describe the need to connect with global audiences, though it includes many other factors. These factors include the actual translation of content, as well as the localization of your site to speak more closely to a user’s culturally contextual needs. 

While these terms are all interrelated and support the same marketing goals and strategy, this article primarily focuses on translation options for your industrial and manufacturing website, while also considering some of the localization (sometimes referred to as personalization) that can take place through these systemized options.

Why We Need Website Internationalization and Translation

What is Website Translation?

In the same vein as website internationalization is translation, which can be done through a fully automated system, or manually by a human translator. Both options have valid use cases, though, from our experience, most clients can get away with using a fully automated system for sake of project speed and efficiency. There are implementations that allow you to have a hybrid approach made from automated translations that can be manually overridden. Those options allow you to introduce highly technical content that often requires human translation in the native language for accuracy while depending on automation to expedite the translation of your website’s bulk copy.  This gives a professional translation service in an efficient manner.

Here are some of the common translation tools used by multilingual websites that can give a processional translation for your website.

Common WordPress CMS Website Translation Options

WordPress GTranslate

Lingotek

Weglot

Transposh

Loco Translate

Platform Agnostic Translation Options

Localizer.co
Localize JS

What is Website Localization (or Personalization)?

Localization (or personalization) is different from translation, though closely related. Localization is the concept that you can create content that users care about and understand. It may include translation, but is often more user-centric. When you focus on localization, you’re attempting to ensure the content is (culturally or personally) relevant and understandable to a specific user or persona.

If localization techniques are used, more often than not we’re considering both the users preferred language AND their region. US-EN may show different content than AU-EN (Australia).

For example, one of Windmill’s clients manufactures commercial strollers that are sold internationally. In Commonwealth countries, their website refers to “strollers” as “trolleys.” This distinction isn’t something that an automated translation service would pick up, but you can imagine how significant this cultural, contextual differentiation may be.

Another example: imagine a US-based manufacturer of a complex set of products, that may have limited or altered reach in Germany. It could be that only part of it’s catalog is available, or the catalog may have unique product variations only sold in Germany. Rather than purely translating the English content to German, you may benefit from suppressing entirely or curating German-specific product information for that audience.

Other localized considerations may include time and date formats (MM-DD-YY to DD-MM-YY), content layouts, selecting a website font (or fonts) that are well supported across languages, metric vs. imperial measurements (or a toggle), and so on.

There are also ways to detect and serve content based on audience IP addresses, so that the site server auto detects a users’ location and renders the right version of the site in the right language to anyone viewing it.

Common WordPress Multilingual (Translation and Localization) Options

WPML

Multilingualpress

Translatepress

Polylang (+ Lingotek)

Top Picks: Demo and Example Sites

Fill out the form below and you will receive an email with links to demos of GTranslate and WPML.


Bonus Example

FasTest Translation Tester – This demo is a sample page using the two platform agnostic translation options and some demo content. This proof of concept environment was set up to translate highly technical and specific content, to determine which most accurately translated the content. It was also used to test with the Chinese office if the sites loaded and translated without issue due to unique restrictions within the Chinese government on Google products which are ubiquitous in translation options. With this example, you can have it translate from a Microsoft or Amazon database, or integrate with a few paid human/manual translation services.

A Final Recap

Implementing the right website internationalization and translation programs can seem daunting when you have so many options. The key is finding the right implementation for where your company currently stands, accomplishing up to 95% of the most valuable functionality, without overbuilding an unnecessarily costly (time and budget) solution.

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