Even if you have a .co.uk domain chances are someone somewhere around the world will have viewed your website and they may or may not be able to speak English. Most of the time this probably doesn’t matter as your main business is probably in the UK, however what if you wanted to expand your business or as hotel or holiday company that wanted to appeal potential customers further afield. As a business in the UK our closest neighbours main languages are not English and a multi-language website would make your site more appealing.
WordPress has a plug-in which can make adding another language to your site very easy. You simply add another ‘page’ with the translated text, select the language then publish. Just as you would normally do. The plugin even handles the automatic language selection for the user. If you were in France on a French computer then the language that would be shown for your website would be….French.
We would advise that you get the main landing pages and static pages translated by someone who speaks the language as Google Translate definitely falls down on complicated sentences and context.
For the main European languages – French, German and Spanish, we have people available who can translate content quickly and professionally. Each translator is native to the language so they able to translate context, meaning, tone, and even inflection giving your site a professional look to someone who doesn’t speak English.
Unavoided has provided this service for a website using English and Arabic. The plugin can even do non Cyrillic text, displaying it correctly and clearly. Users can select the language of their choice using a drop down box in the header.
