When you own or manage a website that you want to launch globally and attract users and customers from all over the world, you ponder about the possibility of going multilingual. Doing so would definitely increase the traction and traffic of your website, especially from countries that do not have English as their first language. These days, multilingual website development isn’t so complicated with new tools that make it easier than ever.
What to use: ccTLD or Subdirectory
There are two ways to go about it when going multilingual: either you roll out country-code top level domains (.co.uk,.cn,.id) or stick to your .com and create subdirectories like dot.com/uk or dot.com/cn. If you have your main domain in place, you can consider adopting the latter move—it’s less work but is not any less effective.
When going multilingual, ditch Google Translate widgets
It seems like the easy way out—Google doing the translating for you. But it’s only bad news: Google’s search engine will not in any way index your content, and it’s not a wise marketing move. What you need to do is manually translate website content and getting a native speaker to do it. Expensive strategy? Yes, but it will definitely reap rewards.
Use online translation tools
Look up Babylon’s online translator which proffers hundreds of translations (over 800 language pairs) and dictionaries. Babylon is considered the world’s most convenient and productive translation tool.
Using WordPress? Go for the WPML plugin
WordPress Multilingual or WPML is a heaven-sent for multilingual websites. While you still need a manual translator for your main content, the WPML will make the translations of the essential parts of your website (menus, headers, footers) easier.
There are other strategies and methods to put your multilingual website in place. Contact Osky developers and project managers for more pieces of advice. Better yet—they’ll make the multilingual website for you.
