Going abroad? Here's how to translate your Magento webshop effectively
Your webshop is running well, there are many visitors and orders. It is even going so well that you are making plans to expand abroad. There are several parts you need to take into account, such as translating all content. This can be a lot of work. In this blog, we will go into how to translate your Magento webshop effectively. Do you opt for human translations or AI translations?
What content do you want to translate?
Before you make a decision that you will translate, you want to know what you want to translate. Consider your goals and target audience as well. Do you want to translate everything, or does it make sense to select specific industries or product categories? In-depth keyword research can help determine which categories should be prioritized to best serve your target audience.
In addition, it is crucial to pay attention to SEO aspects, such as hreflang attributes and targeting, to ensure that your shop is properly indexed in search engines and relevant to your international audience.
Also, pay specific attention when translating legal documents. Errors or inaccuracies in these documents can cause legal problems, so human translation and accurate revision are essential.
Human translation vs machine translations
Translating your Magento webshop into other languages is a crucial step to reach a wider audience and achieve international success. But which approach should you choose: human translation or machine translation, and how can this process run smoothly? Let's take a closer look at this important decision.
Human translation: context and nuance
Human translations excel at capturing context and nuance. They provide a deep understanding of the cultural and linguistic subtleties of the target language. This is invaluable when translating product descriptions, marketing copy and other content where nuance is critical.
A professional (native) translator can avoid ambiguities, correctly interpret proverbs and expressions, and accurately empathize with the target audience. In addition, a proofreader can check and refine the translated text, ensuring an impeccable translation.
+ Adding context and nuance to texts
+ Human touch
- Repeated translations (or many translations) can cost a lot of time and money
Machine translation: efficient and scalable
Machine translations (MT) offer efficiency and scalability. They can translate large amounts of text quickly, which is useful if you have a bulky web shop with hundreds of products and pages. Combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI), this can make for a strong translation. Our favorite (and most widely used!) translation tools are DeepL and Amazon Translate.
However, machine translations also have their limitations. They may miss context, misunderstand ambiguities and may have problems translating proverbs and phrases. This can result in translations that are technically correct but do not address the intended audience in the right way.
+ Easy and fast
+ Relatively low cost
- Quality is sometimes a bit lower than human translations
What are experts' opinions?
There are many disagreements around weighing the ultimate choice of automatic translation, manual translation and hybrid. In our experience, the choice varies greatly from webshop to webshop. Your own capacity, desire and budget all play into this.
It is important that your content is of value to your visitors, regardless of whether the content is translated by humans or machines. In February, Google published a blog about AI content not being penalized. For example, choose to have all your content translated by MT and moderated by a language expert.
Choose the translation and workflow that suits you with Elovate
Choose the translation and workflow that suits you. Whether you prefer human translation or use AI, it is essential to create a structure that suits your needs. With Elovate Translations, you have the flexibility to build your own workflow. If you want to design a special workflow now, this is possible. If your preference is to have it fully automatically translated and ready for moderation if desired, that is possible. The choice is yours.
Do 100% human translations have your preference and want to get started with this? It is important that these are well structured so that no duplicate or unnecessary work is done. Within Elovate it is possible to assign tasks to specific employees and there is an extremely fast synchronization to your webshop so that it is online almost immediately. Top
When you regularly have new products or other content on your webshop that needs to be translated, building your own workflow is a must. Within Elovate you have specific options to do this easily. Think of excluding certain attributes in advance, applying customized terminology to ensure quality, and even translating only certain suppliers specifically. Moreover, Elovate allows you to translate everything, not just products, but also categories, CMS pages and blocks. This customizability makes Elovate the ideal application to grow your Magento webshop worldwide, paying attention to every detail.
Now take your translations to the next level!
In short, the choice between human and machine translation depends on the nature of your content, your target audience and your priorities. It may even make sense to consider a combination of both, using human expertise for critical texts and machine translation for more routine translations. Time to cross the border with your webshop!