3 Reasons Your English to Chinese Website Translation Failed

If you’ve had your website translated into Chinese recently you’d expect the Chinese-reading market to start coming in and generate traffic. You should be seeing leads building and conversions happening but if website activity seems to remain as empty as a ghost town, what then could have gone wrong?

A lot of companies take English to Chinese website for granted. They think that all it takes to reach out to a Chinese audience is a Chinese website. It goes much deeper than that, however, and missing some of the basics could result with a horribly ineffective website.

1. Using Purely Machine Translation

Machine translation does make the job much quicker but more than 70% of that translated content loses its context and meaning. “Men’s Bathroom” might be translated into a Chinese rendition of “Pee on Man Here”. Machine translation, in short, leads to awkward choice of words and loss of context.

This is why the best English to Chinese website translation firms only use machine translation as a starting point. After the computer has done its job, the firm turns to its human employees to manually go over every line of translated content, making sure it is contextually appropriate.

2. Lack of Website Localization

Translating a website goes beyond just changing English words into Chinese. You have to get the whole SEO friendly website localized and this means altering the graphical content, website layout, text types, and even the highlighted content to ensure it fits into the cultural context of Chinese readers.

If your company sells solar panels in the UK, then an announcement stating you’ll be opening a new factory in England won’t matter much for Chinese readers. You’ll need to alter content and instead focus on things happening in China such as a press release detailing how your company formed a new partnership with a Chinese firm.

3. No Solid SEO Job

Website translation requires adaptive Chinese SEO work done on it. Did you know that users are more bound to keep visiting your site if there is a link to every language portal at every page instead of just placing language options at the homepage?

When you have a new Chinese version of your website you need to consider as an entirely new entity compared to your original English website. This means you need to conduct an entirely different SEO campaign for it and in a different manner as well.

Keep in mind that translating your website from English to Chinese is but the first step. You need to make sure that the context is correct, and that the layout of the website is correct, and that you have a good Chinese SEO strategy to ensure that the newly translated site hits the audience the way you want it to.

Source:
exportmarketing.net Editor

Export Marketing – exportmarketing.hk