If you are creating a website for your business and you are considering a web marketing campaign to push your products or services to countries other than your own, you will need to consider a multilingual website. A multilingual website simply refers to a website that has content in different languages.
Language localization is the process of translating content into different languages or adapting a language to meet the needs of a specific country or region. Companies with a global presence are taking language differences such as pronunciation, spelling conventions and grammatical patterns into account when creating a web marketing strategy targeted towards specific regional markets.
Collaborative translation, which is translation carried out by a group of people who are not professional translators but have a good knowledge of the specific subject, is growing in popularity. Facebook fan pages have been receiving considerable media coverage recently due to their large-scale collaborative translation project, which in a few short years will make their website available in over 200 languages.
As the term suggests, “collaborative” translation involves groups of people working together to produce the localized content. There are some critics of this type of translation. Since the group members have different backgrounds and degrees of translation ability, the issue of credibility has become one of the noteworthy arguments against collaborative translation. This is certainly something to consider if you are looking to start a project of this nature. You may also want to consider the following recommendations:
– Standardize terms and styles of translation
– Store correct translations and reuse them effectively
– Make the collaboration a lively exchange between the members
If you are looking for more information about translation and/or website localization, here are a couple of websites you can take a look at for further details:
Translations.com – Provider of website localization, software localization, GMS (Globalization Management System) software products, and enterprise-level, professional translation services.
Traduwiki – Traduwiki enables you to eliminate the last barrier of the Internet, the language. Use it to spread your writings, blog posts, textbooks and other texts across the planet. Traduwiki has tools that ease collaborative translations so your friends could loom your text translations with little efforts, and others can do the same.
Worldwide Lexicon Project – The Worldwide Lexicon is a service which enables community-driven translations on any website. If you speak two or more languages join our translation community and help share the most interesting content on the web with the people around the world.