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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Yet another social network - so what’s special about this one?

Finnish-created XIHA is the world’s first multilingual social network. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do offer content in different languages, but this is supported through a monolingual implementation - you have to choose one language for the user interface, and would mostly update your status & post comments, etc in that language. Multilingual people are therefore not easily able to fully express themselves, as to choose one language might alienate friends and followers who do not understand it.

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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…)

There has recently been a further sign of recovery in Europe’s biggest economy - German exports were up more than 3% in June, and the country has experienced unprecendented growth of 2.2% from April to June this year.

A weakening of the Euro in recent months coupled with a strong demand for German goods in Asia has helped to boost exports. (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…)

This post is an explanation of how our International Blast service works, as it’s something we are often asked about.

International Blast was developed as a first step localisation for companies who wanted to begin trading internationally online, but preferred a cautious approach rather than investing a larger amount of money, time and resources in localising their whole website.

Even localising just one or two key pages of a website yields results, and often generates sales in a new target market. By pricing the service at £295, it is also an affordable option if a company wish to test several new markets at once. (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 pleased and proud to welcome Technical Sales Director, and eCommerce expert, Raj Jadeja to the team.

Raj is heading up our London office, in the Clerkenwell area of the city, and has been appointed to meet the needs of our growing community of eCommerce clients, and also to provide a local presence for many of our other valued customers based across the capital.

If you’d like to meet Raj, give our London office a call on 0207 193 0441, or drop him an email at raj@web-translations.co.uk.

Yorkshire companies are “well-positioned to sell into Scandinavia”, according to Danish business expert and former diplomat, Benny Sørensen.

At a recent event to inform businesses in the region about opportunities in Scandinavia, the organisers (Import-Export consultants SØRENSEN, and Denmark’s inward investment organisation Copenhagen Capacity, teamed with the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce International Department)  experienced unprecedented demand from Yorkshire businesses wishing to attend, and have urged companies who are interested in trading with Scandinavian countries to act quickly to make the most of the opportunities available. (more…)

We did it again! Thanks to your eager voting, we were ranked in the Top 100 Language Blogs this year for the second year running!

See the full list…

Thanks to all of you who voted for us, we really appreciate your support!