Providing your international customers with user-friendly, localised websites can give your company a competitive global advantage. It can boost brand awareness and trust, too.
Those are important ingredients for success, especially in the earliest days of serving new global markets. But there's a lot more riding on these translated sites than just brand credibility. Your translated website must support local sales teams, boost conversion rates and in-market revenue and more.
With so much on the line, it’s critical to choose a website translation approach that delivers a world-class translated experience for your customers—and equally important, gets along with your current and future content-management technologies, marketing software and multichannel content.
The proxy-based approach to website translation—where technologies are used to leverage the code and content of your flagship primary-market website, making it easy to translate, deploy, and continuously operate multilingual versions—is widely considered one of the most elegant and easy solutions on the market.
Proxy-based website translation makes it easy to translate, deploy, and continuously operate multilingual websites.
Why the Proxy Approach Works
While many Content Management Systems (CMSs) offer capabilities that claim to make website translation easy, the truth is, they often fall short. Their multilingual features are undercooked for the rigors of day-to-day website translation, and often don't have important translation tools at all. The resulting translated content is often inconsistent, and presented on-site in ways that "break" page templates. This creates an amateurish-and brand-damaging-look and feel.
In contrast, the proxy translation approach to website translation operates independently of your CMS. It instantly responds to users' online requests, presenting a properly localised customer experience in their preferred languages. This secure solution can be used with any tool, handle any site, and read any programming language. And since it’s independent of your CMS, it offers seamless migration when you re-platform.
The result is a swift, seamless, optimised website experience that visitors can enjoy without frustration. The best proxy solutions provide other advantages, including:
Once-and-for-all translations
Great proxy solutions know when previously-translated phrases appear throughout a localised website, and will automatically populate those translations at no cost to the customer. Translate once, pay once, publish everywhere.
Intelligent change detection
Changes that occur on your primary-market site—such as new or updated content—are detected and sent for translation automatically, without need of notification from you.
The best proxy-based solutions can be used with any tool, handle any site, and read any programming language.
Elimination of separate websites
Because the proxy translation solution uses the code of your primary-market website to dynamically present translated content to global uses, you'll never need to host and operate separate, localised websites.
Responsive translation for external content
The best proxy solutions can translate third-party content, graphics, multimedia and applications, ensuring smooth user experiences at every point of their visit to your website.
Independent functionality, regardless of CMS
The proxy solution expands the effectiveness of your CMS; it doesn't replace it. You can further your investments in your current CMS, or switch CMSs altogether, without it impacting the performance of your multilingual sites.
Speed to market
The best proxy solutions move fast, getting your localised sites up and running in as few as 30 days.
Quick testing in new markets
A proxy approach enables your company to venture into new markets with little to no risk. You can translate part of your website for an emerging market, to gauge customer interest in your products and services. This takes very little time or money to do.
Proxy solutions don't compete or replace your CMS. They expand the effectiveness of your CMS and marketing efforts.
A Turn-Key Solution Reduces Operational Complexity and Overall Costs
Traditionally, creating multilingual websites requires many different processes well beyond translation, including exporting content from back-end systems, sending source files to translators, managing the translation workflow, receiving and copying the translated content back into your system, testing for quality, synchronising daily changes, and then repeating the entire procedure for all languages.
That leads to costs that are often far higher than initially perceived.
Traditional approaches to website translation generate more effort—and far more costs—than most people expect.
Of the proxy-based solutions on the market, only fully turn-key solutions completely eliminate that customer-side cost and effort. Only turn-key proxy solutions can deliver these key benefits:
Technology
Many companies can provide good translation. But fully turn-key solutions are designed to handle all of the under-the-hood complexities that make website translation such a burden for your IT team.
Effortless
Turn-key solutions require no effort from you at launch, and on-going. All personnel, processes and technology are provided by the vendor.
Customer-Aligned
Many vendors try to maximise your translation spend. But the best turn-key solutions provide ways to ensure your international success, so that you can keep adding languages—and expanding your global reach.
World-class turn-key proxy solutions dramatically decrease costs and effort, a good thing for smaller marketing teams.
Conclusion
As you examine the marketplace for website translation solutions, consider vendors that offer the proxy-based approach. This technological approach reduces effort on your end while reducing costs.
The very best vendors offer fully turn-key proxy solutions that are designed for an effortless experience on your part, a world-class online experience for your global customers, and technologies and processes that are designed for ultimate efficiency, cost-savings and success for your business.
Last updated on September 16, 2020
