Don’t worry! Translating your website is not as daunting a task as it may seem. We have translated hundreds of websites for individuals and businesses, and will guide you through every step.

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How Long Will It Take?

This will depend on the number of words you wish to translate.

Don’t worry, we won’t make you count them by hand. Just send us your URL and we’ll put it through our word-counting software, getting you a word count in minutes!

If you have pages that don’t need to be translated, just let us know and we’ll deduct them from the word count.

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How Much of My Website Should I Translate?

We recommend that you carefully consider whether each page is worth translating.

For example an “About Us” page is definitely important to translate. However, you may decide that some blog posts are really more relevant to speakers of one language than another.

If you decide to proceed with WordPress’ WPML plugin (will discuss more soon) it is really easy to send only relevant content for translation.

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Which Languages Should I Translate Into?

Who is your target audience? Would you like to expand your business into China? Do you think that your blog has the potential to go viral in India? Let us know your business goals. We’ll help you decide the language, dialect, and writing system that will best achieve your objective.

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How Much Will it Cost?

Website translation is charged per word. Once again, if you need a word count of your site, just send it to us and we’ll run it through our software!

Translation rates depend on the language pair (with high-frequency pairs such as English into Spanish being among the cheapest, and low-frequency pairs such as Norwegian into Amharic being among the most expensive).

Rates will usually range from between USD $0.10-30/word. Therefore, a 3,000-word website from English into Spanish will likely run you about USD $400.

However, if you ever receive a quote lower than this, beware: your translation provider may be using machine translation.

Extra Cost Savings: Meridian Linguistics uses human translators alongside machine translation tools that help organize content, so that we do not charge for repetitions or similar phrases. If your website has repeating text (for example product descriptions or bios) this can potentially save you a lot of money on your website translation.

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Do I Need to Use any Special Plugins?

Plugins can definitely make it easier! If your website is on WordPress, WPML makes the translation process much more streamlined. Download the plugin and ask us for our API key, then start sending content to us to translate right away!

Your translations will appear on the site automatically when they are ready. This eliminates the need for a linguist to carefully place and arrange content for you.

If you’d rather not get technical, don’t worry! We will download your website text and translate into bilingual Excel files. Then, your website developer can easily locate and place translations.

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What About When I Update My Site?

If you are planning on making frequent updates, we highly recommend using a plugin like WPML.

This way you can easily send only the content to be updated, so that we can update your translation.

And using our machine translation tools we mentioned before, we will update your stored translations applying cost-savings wherever we can.

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What Other Considerations Should I Keep In Mind?

Layout

There may be a few adjustments to make after translating, to make sure that your layout is aesthetically pleasing. For example, words tend to vary in length across languages: Chinese words are relatively compact, and German words being…well, German. You may want to spend some time adjusting spacing or segmentation after your translation is finished.

The Value of the Translation

If you’re targeting new markets, make sure you are ready to fully commit: are you offering payment and shipping options that will make sense to this audience? Is the content relevant and appropriate?

In some cases, you might want to consider sourcing original content in the relevant language, rather than translating. Many multilingual websites choose a hybrid of translation and original multilingual content.

Are You Ready?

.If you’re reading this, you have probably already started thinking global. You’re on the right track! In fact, did you know that you can reach 50% of the world’s internet users with just three languages?

Just make sure you are using human translation: machine translation mistakes can range from humorous to outright offensive, costing you your reputation with any given market in a flash.

Meridian Linguistics is fully-equipped to provide rush service in dozens of languages, with particular strong resources in the Asian, European, and Middle Eastern languages.

Contact us to learn more about translating your website!

Order a Website Translation