Translating Your Website? Here’s the Right Approach to Reduce Cost and Time

Take this fact and do things accordingly! Internet users (can we call them your customers of tomorrow?) are only happy when you give them the feeling that they belong and gather online in a website that not only talks to them in their own mother tongue, but also reflects their identity, their traditions, and their culture.

Also never listen to the short-sighted theories that claim that localizing your business website, or adapting it to a multilingual site, is a formidable costly project. Instead, look at the many benefits that will be brought to your company through website localization ─ if any!

Benefits of Website Localization

When companies take into consideration that only 20% of our globe’s population speaks English as their mother tongue, they should look at the huge online opportunity of engaging the other 80% of the population. Consequently, these businesses will definitely realize that by localizing their websites, they will be able to reach prospects that belong to the 80% underserved category ─ thus expanding their consumer base each time they adapt their website to a specific region. What a great privilege for your company to cross geographical borders and establish a network of customers that is diversified, connected and global!

More importantly, following your understanding of your target audiences’ preferences, when you localize your website ─ in terms of style, content, layout and even fonts, formats, artworks, and colors  ─ to suit their tastes, you’re ensuring that you’re providing your site visitors with a friendly online “user experience” that makes them feel at home.

What is Translation Management System (TMS)?

The Translation Management System (TMS) is a program or software that is playing a great role in automating and centralizing many aspects of the translation process, making it more controllable, eliminating repetitive tasks, maximizing translator efficiency, and making it easier to manage high volumes of translation work ─ especially when the translation project involves multi-person teams who might be located in different countries.  

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A content management system (CMS) is an application that is used to manage web content from one single administration tool or interface, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish. The content management system allows users to create, edit and publish content from anywhere and at any time.

How The Integration between TMS and CMS Can Benefit Your Business?

Now that your business is standing out in your sector, you’ve come to the milestone of planning to extend into global markets, and you’ve embarked upon the wonderful job of having your website localized so that your content becomes available in the local languages of your target market , so you’ll today or tomorrow have to face the challenge of system integration between your CMS and the language service provider’s TMS ─ namely, integrating your website multilingual versions with your LSP’s translation tool. So, how and why?

As for the “why”, the plausible reason is that we’re living in 2019, a time when your company doesn’t have the luxury of time to hire people for just copying and pasting strings of code from content systems into Microsoft Word or Excel files to send for translation.

Simply you don’t have a lot of options. To extend your footprint into new markets and compete globally, you have to automate and streamline your multilingual translation workflows by integrating your content management system CMS with your language service provider’s translation management system TMS.

How Does TMS and CMS Integration Work?

By connecting your content management system (CMS) to the translation management system (TMS) of your language services vendor, all the translation management workflows can be efficiently streamlined, along with the wonderful advantage of bypassing the traditional file transfer process and email communication which usually add up to workload and increase the margin of error.

Mainly, the process includes 3 technical components:

• Content Management System: your existing web content platform.
• Your vendor translation management system that handles all the translations process.
• API: a plugin that connects your CMS with TMS to have a multilingual web content platform.

The process is implemented as below:

1- The content is created, added, stored, and maintained in the CMS.

2- Then comes the installation of the API. The API will be responsible for connecting your CMS with your vendor’s TMS, then an automatic transfer of files between CMS-TMS will be done smoothly. The transfer can be done back and forth multiple times and through the API you can control which files can be transferred -this is in case you have confidential content- to your language vendor.

3– The translation phase will be the last step. Your language service partner will start working on translating the transferred files to the agreed languages. Once they are done, the API will seamlessly connect the TMS to the CMS and transfer the files back.

The process looks easy but believe me it’s not! 

Every CMS has its own features and definitely will need a different API to be able to integrate with other TMS. Even if you managed to choose and install an API, but not all types of content can work with the same workflow, for example, some pages might require human translation, editing and proofreading, while other pages might require machine translation and then post-editing by a human.

But at the end, whatever the process or the steps that are implemented, by linking the two systems, the client will be getting a flawless streamless flow of content translation on his website besides many advantages.

Four Advantages of TMS─CMS Integration

Since you’ve certainly, by now, waved goodbye to the ancient days of inefficient manual file transfer between your business and your website localization vendor, rest assured you’ll also enjoy a number of benefits, including:

1- With workflows optimized, you will be able to publish your content simultaneously across multiple platforms, languages and locations. The road is now open for your business to boost customer engagement by extending your messaging to more and more international customers and prospects.

2- Time is saved and your project turnaround is accelerated when you forget the bad old days of copying and pasting strings of text to Word or Excel files and the endless struggles faced in the transferring process

3- Save costs of installing, learning, managing, and maintaining new plugins, tools or software programs to manage your content and translate it to other languages.

4- This integration between the company’s CMS and the language service vendor’s TMS further ensures data security and content confidentiality.

Torjoman and Website Localization

When it comes to website localization, Torjoman is always the right partner. So, why?

1- You work with a partner that has a proven track record of localizing most of global and regional brands websites in the region.

2- Our developers can integrate your website CMS, whatever web application you are using, with our TMS effortlessly so your content will be automatically transferred back and forth between the two systems, reducing your costs and manual work.

3- We assure your new localized website content is SEO-optimized.

4- We assign a dedicated project manager to coordinate all tasks internally with our team to make sure that all our clients’ requirements are being implemented exactly as requested.

Our website localization services have been fueling the business growth of hundreds of companies by adapting the language, appearance and functionality of each website for foreign language markets ─ helping these businesses to expand their global footprint.

For further information on how we can help make your website be number one across all your new markets, contact us today.