If you’re looking for a handy guide to kick-start your website translation journey, then you’ve come to the right place!
The first step to take when planning to translate a website is to look at the right target market for your business. Then decide on the languages you need. Once you have a scope for the content, you need a CMS setup that supports multiple languages. You can then export your content in a translatable format and have it translated.
This guide covers each stage in the process. Every successful multilingual website project moves through seven stages, and most problems come from rushing the early ones.
Step 1: The “Who?”, The “What?”, and The “Where”?
The first decision is not how to translate but what to translate, and for whom.
Start with evidence. Your analytics will show where international visitors already come from, and your sales team will know which markets are generating enquiries. Our guide to the best languages to localise into covers this in more depth.
Then decide which content goes into each language. Many sites carry years of blog posts, archived news and legacy pages that no overseas customer will ever read. A typical approach is to translate core commercial pages and transactional journeys in full, and to translate the blog selectively. This one decision often has more effect on budget than anything else.
It also helps to separate translation from localisation. Localisation adapts currencies, date formats, measurements, imagery, legal text and offers for each market. A booking engine with prices only in sterling is translated, but it has not been localised.
Step 2: Set Up Your CMS
The CMS platform you use determines how translated content is published and updated, so it’s important to set this up before translating any content.
Most modern CMS platforms like WordPress support multiple languages either natively or through plugins. You’ll also need to choose a URL structure, such as subdirectories (/fr/), subdomains (fr.example.com) or country domains (example.fr). Each option has different pros and cons in terms of SEO, hosting and general management.
A multilingual plugin is often enough for managing content in different languages. However, a plugin only handles the mechanics of translation and not the quality of the translated content. A plugin with built-in machine translation can quickly generate multilingual content, however the main downside of this is that these translations will often be literal, and could potentially alienate your international customers.
Step 3: Export Your Content
The best way to translate your website content is by exporting the content into workable files. Exporting content into translation-friendly formats saves time and money and avoids errors from copying and pasting text into a CMS.
Depending on what’s on your main site, you may need to translate different elements. When dealing with on-page content, XLIFF, CSV or JSON files are easy to process, and translators can work with them in their CAT Tool of choice. The same files are suitable for the various interface strings (buttons, menus etc.). Emails are best tackled in either Word or Excel files, with a review of the implemented translations in the email file afterwards.
To avoid any back-and-forth between clients and translators, it’s always a good idea to provide a glossary of terms explaining the meaning of any industry-specific terminology or any branded content that needs to stay in English. Tone guidelines are also helpful, as they can help linguists maintain your brand’s tone of voice and style even in different languages.
Interface strings and emails are often the most commonly forgotten items. They usually live in separate files from page content, and a translated site with English error messages or popups makes the site look unprofessional and unfinished.
Step 4: Choose The Right Approach
The approach you take with the translation method depends on how visible and important each piece of content is. Many sites use multiple methods in tandem with each other.
Machine translation can be used for back-end and internal content, particularly if it is quite a high volume. However, it is best to have the translations post-edited by a translator to make sure everything is consistent in terms of terminology and overall linguistic quality.
For customer-facing pages such as landing pages, home pages and marketing copy, professional human translation is the way to go. Despite taking longer to complete than machine translations, it will be well worth the effort as you will have a translated page that looks and reads perfectly naturally to native speakers.
If you have native speakers of a given language on your team, they can also review the translations for product knowledge to ensure the correct terms are used. However, if they are not trained translators, then it is unwise for them to translate the content into the target language. Collaboration between in-house staff and professional translators is a good combination to perfect your multilingual content.
Step 5: Build In Multilingual SEO
Something to consider with website translations is how the translated page will rank in a new market. Translating words that rank highly in English SEO scores won’t rank the same way in a market like Latin America. Researching the best key words in the target market will be useful to making sure your site ranks highly to get as many eyes on as possible.
Once you have the relevant target market keywords, make sure translated titles, meta descriptions and slugs use those terms to increase the SEO score. This will mean that your multilingual pages will score highly in the target markets and allow your content to reach a larger audience.
Step 6: Test In Context Before launch
Translations should always be checked on the live page layout before being officially published. Text that could read correctly on a spreadsheet or word document can appear truncated in places. Languages like German and French text often run longer than English and can overflow when used for buttons. Right-to-left languages and Asian scripts may require layout and font adjustments. Ask a linguist to review the staging site, then run real test journeys in every language, including forms, search, booking and payment to ensure that the process.
Step 7: Keep Everything In Sync
Maintenance is where most multilingual sites slip. The English site is organic and dynamic, so it keeps changing regularly. The trap a lot of multilingual sites fall into is that the website translations don’t receive the same level of attention. Your website translations should be kept in good shape in the same way as your English content.
Whenever English content changes or gets added, the changes should be reflected in the translated versions. Translation memory stores your approved translations, so you only pay for new or changed text. All your terminology will stay consisted as well.
Looking for website translations? Contact our team for a quote or a no-obligation discussion about your website, platform and markets.
12 November 2026 10:29