Web-Translations is pleased to announce its acquisition of Batley-based company Live Translation.

www.livetranslation.com is the world’s first real-time translation service powered by human translators. It offers professional translation in minutes as well as a fully managed document and website translation service, making it the ideal complement to Web-Translations’ existing portfolio of services.

With prices starting from as little as £1.99, Live Translation is ideal for translation of emails, text messages, and blog posts.

Managing Director of Web-Translations Daniel Rajkumar is naturally thrilled about the takeover:

“This is a great opportunity for us, as we can now cover both ends of the market: the corporate and SME clients who have planned budgets to spend on their translation needs, and the smaller businesses and individuals who are looking for a more economical service, but still demand a certain level of quality.”

The next step will be to localise the website into different languages, then integrate Live Translation with email-translations.com, and other services such as blog translation that Web-Translations is already offering. The service will also be expanded to include additional language pairs.

Sign up for your free Live Translation account here to try it for yourself!

Web-Translation is proud to be backing the Quality in Translation initiative.

This campaign has been launched with the aim of promoting and fostering awareness of the skills and talents necessary to work in translation, and improving quality levels across the industry. Translation is a fine art, and translators often do not receive the credit they deserve. A good translation should give the impression that the text was authored in that language, and should convey the same tone, style, and ideas as the original.

Few people are aware of what it takes to produce a good quality translation. Not only must a translator have proficient skills in their native language, and at least one foreign language; they must also be knowledgeable about their particular area of expertise, whether it be financial, legal, or medical, to name but a few. A translator must be efficient, hard-working, and willing to go the extra mile to ensure that all terminology is correct, and that all terms are accurate. This often involves extensive, time-consuming research, as well as dialogue with the client, and colleagues to clarify and get advice on particular terms.

Here at Web-Translations, we are very appreciative of the work our translators carry out, and would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to all of them for their hard work over the past 10 years.

Quality is very important to us, and is an issue we take very seriously. Delivering a high quality translation is, of course, vital in ensuring that a client will return to us in the future. More than that, it is a matter of principle. We are not prepared to deliver a poor translation to one of our clients, and so we take great measures to ensure that we don’t. Ensuring high quality translations is an aspect of the business that every member of our company is involved in. Our Sales team ensures that the delivery promises they make to our clients allow the translation and proofreading to be completed by experts, who have enough time to focus on the project, and work on it to the best of their abilities. Our Marketing team spreads the message that we are a reputable, dedicated company, who constantly seek to deliver outstanding translations. Our Projects team make sure that projects are assigned to suitable, capable translators who specialise in the required subject area.

As a supporter of the Quality in Translation campaign, Web-Translations is committed to:
1) Striving for the best possible translation every time
2) Only accepting assignments that allow them to strive for this goal
3) Declining assignments at prices that undercut this goal
4) Only working with professional translators translating into their native language
5) Only handing assignments to translators specialised in the particular field
6) Constantly striving to improve translators through constructive feedback and ongoing training
7) Actively raising the awareness of buyers about the goals of the “Quality in Translation” campaign

As our Testimonials show, these are policies that we have employed since the beginning of Web-Translations, and that, as a proud champion of the Quality in Translation campaign, we will continue to recognise and implement.

Translation is a complex service that often doesn’t quite get the recognition it deserves. Many people who buy translation may never have lived in another country and so have no frame of reference for the level of skill required to complete a good translation.

Consequently many fall into the trap of buying translation as a commodity, as if buying rice or cotton. But translation is a service, and like all services, it is performed by people so education, skill and time all contribute to delivering the final ‘product’ (for want of a better expression).

While it’s logical that you would want a service to be performed by the best people, it’s actually quite alien to most of us to buy a service from a) someone you don’t know b) aren’t ever likely to meet and c) where you as a buyer do not actually consume or experience the service first-hand.

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Now, before I get shot down by a flurry of irate translators, hear me out.

There’s been an increase recently in the use of post-edited machine translation for some projects where the volume of content is so huge, and the time window so short that human translation, and then proofreading and subsequent editing of the text, would just not be practical. We at Web-Translations are observing this trend with great interest. (more…)

SEO is just as important for your foreign language sites as for your English one. Simply translating content and putting it online unfortunately does not mean that any of your potential customers will find the pages you have created for their benefit.

As Nataly Kelly of the Common Sense Advisory says:

“It just doesn’t work to assume that a target audience who has been linguistically underserved in the past will miraculously show up at your site in the months following the launch of your new content. [...] you need to publicize your new content and drive your target audience to the new site. Just as with your source language website, expect the traffic to build over time.” (more…)

 Have a look at some of the recent projects we’ve been working on: 

• South African Airways, national airline of this year’s World Cup host nation - this project involves website localisation and managing multilingual updates.
• Aspinal of London, famous for their iconic leather goods - we set up a new ecommerce system, localised the site, and Aspinal now have a fully functioning Japanese ecommerce site.
• The Dorchester Collection, an international hotel management company - we’ve localised websites for various individual hotels in the collection, and translated documents for print as well.
• Future Publishing, an international special-interest media group - we provide translations of newsletters, press releases and magazine articles for their client Colnago.
• Citigroup, a leading global financial services company that operates in 140 countries - we translate various documents and web copy for several departments.
• Quiet PC, a leading supplier of PC cooling and quietening products - Used our International Blast service to test new markets to see where their products would be most popular.

If you’d like to be featured as one of our success stories, get in touch!

We’re going to take you step-by-step through a localisation project to explain how it’s done. The example we’ve chosen is the multilingual site we did for Loc8tor.

Loc8tor.com is an ecommerce site where customers can buy Loc8tor devices to help them keep track of keys, mobile phones, pets and all sorts of other belongings. This is an ideal showcase for the different elements involved in the professional localisation of a website.

With any website, the first step is to get the content into a format that translators can easily work with.

There are two main ways of translating content from a CMS - the translators can work directly into the system and input translations as they go along, or an export can be obtained from the system - usually either XML or Excel format.

Translation is not always done in a linear fashion - starting at the beginning and finishing at the end - a translator needs to be able to skip parts and come back to them later, raise queries if something is unclear etc. When it comes to proofreading the translation, a file will usually be easier to work on and edit than the content within the CMS. With this in mind, an exported file is often the best method.

So, the Project Manager will deliver the file to the translators, or give them access to the CMS as necessary. Once the translation is complete, the proofreaders do their part. Any images or other parts of the website not already part of the CMS/export file would be localised at this stage too - a professional localisation includes everything, not just the obvious text components of the website.

If an export file has been used, then this needs to be imported back into the CMS. This is usually done by the client’s web team, but sometimes we are given an access login to the system and can upload it ourselves.

The published sites we localised for Loc8tor can be found at www.loc8tor.eu, www.loc8tor.fr and www.loc8tor.es.

With some projects, this is where our involvement ends, but there are other stages that are recommended in order for the localised website to be a success:

Usability testing - this is especially important for eCommerce websites or any others where transactions take place. The localised site is tested from the user’s point of view to make sure all functions work correctly, links lead to the pages they should, etc.

Multilingual SEO & eMarketing - just because you’ve invested in localising your site doesn’t mean that customers in that particular country know it is there! Submitting your site to local search engines, building some inbound links and promoting the new website online will all help get more traffic, and these initial measures are included as standard in our Strategic Approach to Localisation packages.

Managing updates - it’s important that you consider how updates to the website will be managed. Many CMSs can be configured to send updates for translation, which minimises the delay in keeping the multilingual site current.

Keyword Research - Knowing the most popular search terms for your product or service is critical. We help to capture maximum exposure by identifying not just your keywords, but also complementary keywords and competitive keywords to help you optimise your website, and maximize the effectiveness of your multilingual Pay Per Click campaigns.

Pay-Per-Click - ideal for giving your web traffic a boost, for promotions, sales and to announce new content. In most industries it will be expensive to stay at the top of results using PPC alone, but it should form part of your overall web strategy if you have sufficient budget.

A good localisation strategy will consider these additional elements of the process as well as simply translating the main body of text on a website.

If you have any questions about website localisation, or any comments about this article, please let us know.

We’re proud to announce that Web-Translations has become a member of the Association of Translation Companies.

As one of the oldest and most respected professional bodies in the translation industry, members of the ATC are carefully vetted before admission into membership, adhere to a strict code of professional conduct, are subject to the rulings of a professional ethics committee and carry full professional indemnity insurance cover to safeguard the interests of the translation purchaser.

Membership bestows upon Web-Translations some well-earned recognition of the excellent service we offer - it’s great to hear from an independent party how great a job we’re doing!

Oh dear! If ever there was an example of how not to translate a website it must be the London Eye website. It would seem that the Merlin Group clearly don’t care about their international visitors…

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The latest version of Click4Translation is now online, and we’re inviting you to test it - please sign up at www.click4translation.com and get a quote for any translation project by uploading your documents, or submitting a website URL - it’s as simple as that!

Click4translation makes it quick and easy to get a quote for your translation work, with a simple 5 stage process that takes about 2 minutes to get a price.

• There’s no new software to learn or install
• The website can be accessed anywhere at any time, making it easy to buy translation wherever you are
• Instant and easy – no waiting to receive your quote
• Best of all, using Click4translation is free!

We’re asking you to explore the system, try it out for yourselves and report back on any problems you encounter - all feedback helps us improve click4translation and make into the ideal instant quote system.

Help us to hone our new tool and have your say on features you’d like to see - please address all comments and suggestions to: click4translation@web-translations.co.uk