Should I Translate My Blog?

Summary: My English language blog post is performing well. Should I translate my blog into other languages?

Congratulations! You’ve been creating content that fills the needs of your audience and generates meaningful traffic for your site. Now you think it’s worth exploring whether you can build on this by translating your blog posts into other languages. What do you need to consider?

SEO Value Expanding your audience by reusing your content in multiple languages creates more pages on your site and offers you more pages from which to have internal links. All this builds greater SEO value. And the cost is only what you might pay in translation labor or fees.

But you should know that even a well-performing blog will not necessarily perform comparably in the short term in the translated version. SEO and organic search can be long tail and your expectations should be adjusted accordingly. It could take anywhere between 18 months to 3 years before you see significant SEO results, so bear that in mind when deciding how best to allocate your time, effort, and money.

Establishing Trust For Your BrandIf your blog content is useful to English speakers it will likely be useful to speakers of different languages. Helping people by providing valuable content is a great way to build brand authority and trust. If you create useful content, your audience will be more likely to pay for your product or service. But do your research to verify if the potential market in that other language is worth the effort and expense of translating your blog

What languages should I pick?- Are there non-English inbound search terms on your site that indicate interest from readers in that language? That’s one sign that you’ll be providing value to the readers of that language.

• Is there a target market you are trying to engage with this content? You need the translation to be localized for that market. What does that mean? Read one of our blog posts on localization and the importance of getting this right.

Website Localization - More Than Translation

How should I have the translation done?

• Google Translate - While year by year this service is improving, it still has a long way to go before it is worth trusting your brand’s reputation with it. I’ve read blog posts that suggest that translating blog posts that have a light or whimsical tone is a safe use case for Google Translate. Not true. Humor and tone are the first casualties of machine translation by Google or any other automated translation system.
• Machine Translation - Rember that rule for “Good, Cheap, Fast”. Most of the time you only get to pick two. MotaWord comes the closest to providing all three with our collaborative translation platform. Read our assessment on the current state of Machine Translation technology. Machine Translation Ready to Take Over the World? Not Yet, Pinky!
• Professional Translation Agency While this is more reliable than the above two options it takes more time and is significantly more expensive than the other options. Often there will be a minimum charge that makes short blog posts prohibitively expensive to translate.
• MotaWord has no minimum charges, is performed by vetted translators, a proofreader, all on a platformed optimized to produce the highest quality human translation work possible. And your job will be back in your hands faster than any single translator could ever do.

So, if you decide that translating your blog makes good business sense, make another smart move and choose MotaWord for your translation needs.