General Multilingual Solution refers to a solution that develops out of the available resources and the existing set of capabilities. It doesn’t fulfill a customized requirement and works well when the need is standard, and it is pretty much aligned with its capabilities.
In many cases when Multilingual Solution demands some specific feature, the general solution does not prove to be useful.The user has to adjust his needs as per the available capabilities, instead of the solution doing it.
Now, in regards to going multilingual, a lot of CMS-based websites use plugins that the CMSs offer. The plugins help them translate the site in the language they want. But to what extent, and how effectively, are concerns constituting a critical area of discussion when it comes to global expansion.
These plugins are often general in nature and cater to standard translation requirements. Many business websites use them, as initially they don’t have to spend time and money on a separate, more accurate, and customized translation solution. Hence, at least for that moment, the solutions prove cost-effective and time-saving, although it represent a short-sighted approach.
Such solutions provide limited functionalities, options, and capabilities. Hence, when you think from the strategic point of view, they don’t prove as useful and accurate and affect critical concerns such as user experience. But the limitations aren’t restricted to static translations. There are others as well pointing at deploying specialized and customized multilingual solutions. Let us take a look at them.
5 Challenges with Off-the-Shelf Multilingual Solution
1. Replication of the Entire Website
Common solutions that aren’t specialized multilingual website solutions, when used, replicate the entire website and present the translated version of the website.
While you may be okay with such functionality if you want to translate everything at once, you may find it a challenge if you don’t want to do so, and intend to translate only a part of it.
Now, there’s another aspect to this, and that is change management. If you translate the website at once, and perhaps, don’t update it for a brief time, you may not have a problem with the solution.
But, when your website undergoes continual or regular updates, it does not work, as it may not have an exclusive change management solution. It cannot detect changes that have happened to the original page of the website. Hence, it requires you to make manual changes, manual page imports, exports, and then uploads to the translated file and the appropriate section of the website.
So, essentially, if you replicate the entire website, updates turn complicated, and if you use the specified translation mechanism of the available plugin, website change management becomes a concern.
2. Translator cannot Identify the Context.
Often, when the change volume or portion is too small, and when such a contextless sentence or is translated without knowing the context, understanding the translated text becomes a challenge to understand, as users think of it as an abrupt addition to the content.
Translating such standalone sentences or paragraphs, without understanding their relation with the surrounding content, and its overall objective proves inaccurate and appears incorrect, let alone connecting with the target audience. CMSs have separate templates and text. Hence, when you export the text, the template doesn’t go with it, and which is where the context remains unidentified.
3. Translated Pages don’t get Indexed with the Search Engine.
Some translation solutions use scripting technology. When the English page is delivered to the user, the Java script gets executed, extracts all the English content, and sends it to the translation server. When the server responds with the translated text, it runs once again and then replaces the text.
One of the most significant problems with this system is that the initial HTML page is delivered in the original language, and which the search engine indexes. However, the search engine does not run JavaScript and therefore the website does not index the translated page.
As a result, the search engine cannot see the translated content. It does not rank the translated page, one of the most significant purposes of creating a multilingual website.
Another challenge is that of incomplete translation. The translation system gets text for translation, only till someone manually run the script. A lot of CMSs these days use dynamic data population. The template is in HTML, while the data is in JSON. Now, if your script runs before your system gets the JSON data, you won’t the entire set of data and which results in incomplete translations. Hence, when you replace the text, you see a set of partially translated data, which thus ruins the user experience.
In such a situation, even if you wait for the JSON data to arrive to put forth your translation request, you encounter a problem. How? The text received while waiting for the JSON data is shown in English by the browser. As a result, when the user opens the webpage, he initially sees the text in English, and over a period of 2-3 seconds, he starts seeing the translated text. This isn’t very pleasant for the user.
4. Translation Inconsistencies
Translation inconsistencies is a crucial concern from the viewpoint of user experience. Dealing with multiple languages requires a thorough understanding of the appropriate fonts for every language you intend to translate your website.
5. Font Issue
Using fonts that do not belong to the appropriate font family, and do not consider linguistic variations, alphabet sizes (height and width), character sizes, sentence structures, etc. and the ones that vary in appearance from device to device, spoil the overall user experience.
The above factors impede the content reading process, and therefore users switch to another website. This one may seem a trivial concern. But its criticality is only understood when you see a higher bounce rate – with people leaving your site in almost a few seconds of landing on your translated pages.
Linguify – The Customized and Competent Multilingual Solution
Choosing a general solution may save you some money in the beginning. However, it proves challenging on multiple fronts, some of which you’ve already seen through this blog. LinguaSol’s Linguify is a highly competent translation solution for every website that intends to go multilingual.
It is a result of years of LinguaSol’s research of the common and specific problems of multilingual solutions. It encompasses everything that a comprehensive multilingual solution must should have, from technical and linguistic expertise to language and business-specific translation capabilities to help businesses deliver an amazing user experience.
In this competitive age, you need a solution like Linguify to help you go multilingual in the most appropriate way. Connect with LinguaSol at +91 2022953848 or [email protected] for more information on Linguify.
Ref. No- LSB06211029
