Your website opens the door to a huge audience. Unlike a physical shop, with your online shop there is no limit to your reach. Unless they can’t read your site.
If your site is in English and your potential customer doesn’t speak English, you’ve effectively filtered them out. However, with a multilingual website, you can reach many more people, the only limit is your customer’s internet access.
The more languages you have in your site, the more you can engage with your clients, no matter where they – or you – are located. And if you have an e-commerce website, it is more than a useful asset, it is a necessity.
For example:
- If you have an e-commerce website operating in Germany, it would be wise to have it in Turkish as well. Even if most of the Turks know German, providing them with your services in their mother tongue makes a huge difference.
- Galicia is an autonomous community in Spain and while they all speak Spanish, they prefer to use Galician. If your target market is Spain, offering your information in Galician (as well as other languages spoken in Spain, like Catalan, Basque etc.) will tell your potential clients that they are important.
So how do you make your website accessible in any language.
Shopify is an easy-to-use ecommerce platform that offers a variety of features along with its own and third-party applications. One of these applications is translation.
What should you look for in a translation application?
Import and export of web pages
This accelerates the translation process and keeps the text structure as it is. It provides an easy text transfer, while helping to determine missing translations and tracking your process.
This will also help you to create a Translation Memory (TM) with your preferred language service provider.
When you want to upload a document or blog article to your website that you have already written and translated, it’s easy to publish it on your website.
In-context editor
This lets you edit your translation without downloading them, especially if you are fluent in the target language. It saves a lot of time and helps your webmaster to determine and fix language based errors.
Some languages use longer words, such as German, and when you translate from English into German, your webpage layout will probably needs some amendments.
Human translator option
Automatic translation tools can be useful in many cases when you just need an approximate version. However, in business it’s important to be professional and automated translation cannot create marketing copy using colloquial language to engage the reader.
On the other hand your website cannot be indexed in the translated language, which means you cannot be listed in search engines in any language other than the original language.
Dedicated URLs for each language
This enables you to improve your SEO and visibility in your target country.
No coding and easy to use
Who doesn’t like something that is easy to install!
Right-to-left language support
If you are planning to expand into Arab countries, it’s important to choose an application that supports this.
Languages that require this include: Aramaic, Azeri, Hebrew, Kurdish (Sorani), Persian and Urdu.
Here’s a quick comparison of different translation applications
Bablic
Price: $15 / month
Free Trial: Yes – 14 Days (Not all features available in trial)
E-Mail: support@bablic.com
Website: bablic.com
Features:
- Supports right-to-left languages
- In-context editor
- Import and export of translated context (CSV, XLIFF, gettext, JSON)
- Automatic language detection based on browser language
- Machine translation or human translator
- Page view limitations (including organic and inorganic)
- Price changes according to number of languages and page views + other features
- Needs adding a code if you are working in HTML
- Replace images per language with just 1 click
- Fix style/CSS issues with just 1 click
Langify
Price: $17.50 / month
Free Trial: Yes – 7 Days
E-Mail: support@langify-app.com
Website: support.langify-app.com
Features:
- Easy to install, but takes time
- Multiple domains per language
- Import and export of translations (CSV, gettext, XLIFF, JSON).
- Support for right-to-left languages
- Image translation support
- Allows meta tag translations
- No automatic translation
- Automatic language detection (customers will be redirected to their preferred language automatically)
Langshop
Price: $17.99 / month + 24/7 technical support
Free trial: Yes – 3 days
Email: langshop@devit-team.com
No website
Skype: langshop support
Features:
- Yandex Translation API Key required
- Right-to-left languages are not supported
- Auto translate
- Multiple domains language
- Multilingual currency switches
- No import and exports
Multi Lingo
Price: $7.99 / month
Free trial: Yes – 5 days
Email: extensions@modules4u.biz
Website: modules4u.biz
Features:
- Yandex Translation API Key required
- No coding
- Import/export of products, pages, articles and collections as XML files
- Supports RTL scripts
- Does not translate automatically all pages
- Requires manually initiation for each item
Panda Language Translate
Price: $7.99 / month
Free trial: Yes – 7 days
Email: info@ittechzilla.com
Website: ittechzilla.com
Features:
- Instant translation in 100+ languages (Google translate)
- No code required
- Right-to-left languages are supported
- Very simple set-up (less than 5 min.)
- No import and export
Weglot Translate
Price: Free to $55.00 / month
Free trial: Yes – 10 days
Email: support@weglot.com
Website: weglot.com
Features:
- No code required
- Translate the checkout and email notification
- In-context editor tool
- Translated pages will have dedicated URLs for Google
- Automatic content detection
- 60+ translation languages available
- Machine translation and human translator
Conclusion
Going global or localizing your ecommerce is a big step and delivering a multilingual website is only one aspect of it. To take your business one step further and engage with your customer more closely, consider also multilingual
- Invoices
- Customer support
- Marketing items ( including email templates, subscription forms, and newsletters)
- Automatic currency conversion, international payment services, etc.
If you would like to know more about taking your business global we are more than happy to help, please contact us for more information.
