Translating Websites

I am thinking about offering my website in a few languages and put them on a sub-domain. Is anyone familiar with this? I am looking to hire someone to do this, and would love bids or advice. Mostly advice at this point.
Thanks
-Adam

 

If you can, get someone you trust to proofread all the work done for you. I used to work on a massive website that we were forced to translate to Spanish (which is my first language) and as I was entering the translations into the site, I kept finding wrong or inadequate translations. It got to the point where I had to proof everything that came in and I even ended up translating a few dozen pages by myself.

 

That sounds like a lot of investment $$$, translators charge a pretty penny.

 

Maybe I will find one locally...

 

what languages to you want to translate the website into. May be I can do smth, if what you want is what I know.

 

Why don't you use Google Translator or something like this - okay it's not perfect, but it won't be cheap to get all of your website translated into different languages.

If you do pay someone to do this work - get someone who can speak the language to check it.

 

I hired a guy from DP to translate my english site to spanish. He did a good job but it's tricky work. The second person I had review the translation said "he's young and doesn't know a lot about the building trades" which was true. However, when we looked closely at the Home Depot spanish language books we found lots of variations there too.

It does provide a different perspective to see visits to a frozen pipes page in the middle of summer, but then realize the visitor was from Argentina and it makes more sense.

You also need to consider how you are going to keep your multiple versions in synch with each other. We appended a -es to the end of all the file names; but that will be hard to maintain when we add more pages.

Finally, for all I hear about the size of the market, the response has been distinctly underwhelming

 

That's not a bad idea,you could get more business done if you translate your sites to some other languages.What languages would you like to be translated?By the way,I could work for you if you want it translated to be Chinese

 

Chinese is such a huge market.. even just 1% you can make huge amounts..

 

i am sure there is a script out there that can do tihs. try www.hotscripts.com

 

Yea,you are right..And If someone needs any translation,of course I could work for you and make you satisfied with my work

 

Translating your site to another language is a commitment and huge expense.

So do research and calculations and ensure that it will pay off.

Essentially if you are making an entire site that another language you will be dealing with people who possibly do not speak any other language at all. So this also means e-mail and phone support in that language...

Carefully plan how you will make all of this... how you will update and so on... possibly a CMS... (Content Management System...)

For SEO reasons I think it would be good to make another domain name and preferable from that country i.e .fr for France... (i.e. http://www.google.fr/ ) or at least a .com domain name for that site. And even host it in the country (or close) that the language is (unless it's Spanish - you can host that in USA)

1&1 hosting is a good choice 1and1.co.uk for most European languages...

Hosting in near by will result in people being able to load the site faster (instead of loading it across from the Atlantic (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routing and so on)

http://www.google.fr/ to what ever language it is for will also prefer you better...

and so on...

I think that is a good choice... but be that that person can write well... i.e. some unemployed writer or something will not charge much and put his heart into it... (look/post on craigslist)

 

Becareful though that each domain is on a different IP range - if you have tons of international sites, all on the same IP range, your going to get into deep trouble with Google.

 

If you decide to do this i can offer you smooth translation to spanish, Ive done plenty of it. Just PM me

 

If you go crazy and want your web done in Croatian I'm here for you

p.l.u.r.

 

Well lots of languages have different grammar and orders of where to place things... So the sentences or content would totally be too fustrating to read. Which is why people are willing to pay lots of money for a good translator.

 

i would assume you wish to translate based on visitors from certain countries...I would focus on those first—maybe a survey if it won’t lead to more $$$ it’s not worth it of course.