translating your website

There are many reasons why your site shouldn't be English only. Many around the world surf in other languages. Being international means being multilingual. I'm not saying you should translate your whole site into 30 different languages but having key pages in additional languages will bring you exposure outside the U.S.

Ideally you should use a professional translator (profiency). Second best is a friend or relative who's a native speaker (cost). Those who studied for a year or two in college or spent a semester abroad is next (if you have to). An alternative is to use an online translation server. I like Google Translate.

Google Translate is free (of course) and supports Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

While not perfect and far from fluent, translation servers is ideal for quick'n'dirty rough translations. Write a page in English that's keyword-rich with unambiguous, straigtforward language. Simple pages, short sentences, somewhere between Reader's Digest and Weekly Reader. The goal is a good translation of what you feed the engine, not flowing prose befitting an literature grad student.

Here are some ideas: Feed the same text into two or more translation sites and use the ones that are the most different. Variety in the form of a shotgun approach. Another idea is to rewrite your content twice, resulting in three slightly different versions. Feed each version into a different translator.

Step one is making sure you use the correct HTML language reference tags so that your pages display correctly. You may have to install fonts on your machine too.

Don't forget to translate spider bait like the title, keywords, ALT tags, and description as well as body text. Remember to keep the text short and simple, much like a child's book. The more sophisticated and obtuse the original language, the less useful the machine translated text will be. Think machines as your immediate target, not people.

Use Google Analytics and any log analysis software your ISP provides to track your visitors' language and location in order to judge how effective your non-English authoring efforts are.

Good luck!