Quarterly Review: Custom Translation

Posted on 18th July, 2017 by Applecado

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Suddenly realising we’re already half way through 2017, and that another three months have gone past since our last review we’d like to share some of the development we’ve been working on.

We have one or two projects with imminent launches, so we’ll hold off on those as we’ll be showing them off soon.

Instead, we’re excited to tell you about some very significant changes to a previous project. We launched two sites for Future Facilities separately last year and have recently finished creating a bespoke solution to translating product-site 6SigmaDCX into Japanese.

Originally, Future Facilities had two versions of the site — each catering to the English or Japanese speaking visitors. Their main challenge was ensuring consistency across both websites, it can be hard enough producing content for one site sometimes!

Using a translation service is possible, in fact Google Translate offers a pretty good out-of-the-box solution and there is scope to make it look slightly more integrated with a site. However, Future Facilities didn’t need to translate their site copy into a range of languages — only one, additionally, it was important to avoid any translation errors and incorporate ‘localisation’  (that is unique phrases that are naturally used in certain cultures). Sometimes phrases don’t naturally translate well, and Google consider the gold standard for user experience is having a fluent speaker translate and edit your content.

Now 6SigmaDCX is a fully fledged dual language site, each page defaults in English where readers can click a link to have the Japanese version displayed. Administrators have the same functionality in their CMS, where any copy is added, they have the ability to add manually translated content. We’re currently working on adding this functionality to the main site as well as some very exciting new changes that we’ll also share later.

The benefits to creating a dual-language site such as this are:

Also, one:

Keep in touch with us on our Facebook and Twitter, or check back on our blog and portfolio if you want to see any new launches. We would love to hear from you if you’ve got a project you’re planning.