You are probably already familiar with all the benefits of having a multi-lingual website. Properly translated web pages build trust with their audience, present an accurate image of what you offer and make future conversion easier.
This is precisely why you might give into temptation and use the Google Translate tool to translate your website, as a cheap and swift way of achieving that goal. However, this kind of solution comes with its own risks and there are frequent traps that website owners often fall prey to when using Google Translate.
Google Translate is (not) free
Tools such as Google Translate usually don’t come with initial expenses and are known as ‘free’ tools. However, even though you won’t pay to use the technology itself, expenses will start to roll in the moment you realize that you need to spend time and money fixing all the mistakes made.
Machine translation is simply not precise enough, so you will end up with a translation laced with grammatical and contextual errors. Not to mention that cultural nuances that should be applied to any good translation are simply beyond any automated translation technology we have today.
In other words, you will still need an expert to come in and fix all your translations.
Google Translate is (not) fast
At first glance, this tool might appear lightning fast to use. You enter your text and are served with a translation immediately. However, this only really works if you are translating individual phrases. Google Translate does not possess the ability to recognize and understand context. In other words, the machine is unable to understand what kind of translation or tone the target audience will like. And without this key element, your business will suffer.
So what do you do then? Well, like before you will need to bring in an expert who can go through all of your texts and make corrections and adjustments, which again requires time and money and doesn’t really save you from any expenses.
Google Translate does (not) adjust content
Presenting in the international market requires much more than just plain translation. Namely, in order to succeed, you must employ a strategy that will ensure that your website is properly localized to the target market, while the content itself is personalized for your specific target audience.
This strategy must account for everything – ranging from content management to translation flow and constant direction and maintenance for your web pages.
Google Translate is unable to do any of the above, which is why you must hire a professional translation agency in order to translate your website in the best possible way.
