Im often surprised by how large companies fail in their international translations. For example Ebay.nl showed some pages in German. nl.Aliexpress.com took 2 years to fix a typo in the title of their website. jira.atlassian.com wrongly translated their order/sort button into ‘Bestellen’ (place an order) instead of ‘Sorteren’.

Translation processes and quality problems

Companies use localization tools like Crowdin to manage their translations. Either by making employees in local marketing departments responsible or by hiring translators for each country. As a result your product teams are able to deploy faster as the translations dependencies are spread out over multiple people.

Crowdin screenshot from their homepage (ironicly including a wrong translation)

On the other hand this approach results in translation quality issues. Not all translators maintain the same writing style. Not all translators have the same conversion optimization background. Especially when translating Call To Actions this can lead to different conversion results per country. Translators are also often unaware of the UX designer’s intention with the page or optimal character length within the design. Especially for mobile app translations this can become a problem.

The challenge with translations is that they need to be done before a new feature can go live and often are never checked or improved again after they have gone live.

6 ways to improve your website translations

The biggest challange to solve is to get the UX designer’s and Product Owner’s goals with the page across and maintain consistency within the context of the whole platform. Consistency and quality of translations will have a big impact on your conversion results. These tips can really help to improve your translations:

Clearly brief translators on the brand image and tone of voice

Train translators on SEO copywriting and conversion optimization topics

Use localization tools that give translators the design context

Make someone responsible for improving old translations and consistency throughout user flows

Stimulate users to report translation bugs / feedback

Try to minimize the number of translators per language

Seeing the design context of the text that is being translated can really help translators. I’d suggest to use a localization tool that actually has the option to visually see the context of the whole page design when submitting translation.

If you have a very big website to translate do note that you can’t just bluntly scale up by simply adding more translators to a project. Just look at the translation mess that happend to the Persona 5 game when they kept expanding the translation team to meet deadlines.

It surprises me there isn’t any tool yet out there that combines translations with user feedback. For example asking the first 500 visitors to report translation errors would solve some of the bizarre cases I’ve encountered. Perhaps an opportunity for those working at one of the localization software companies.