Crawl, Walk, Run
How to Implement this Approach
Crawl
For example, the crawl, would be implementing a Google Translate API or a script onto your website to translate its contents. The benefit of this is the extremely low overhead. It will not take more than an hour or two to set up this system effectively.
After this, your site will translate all the content and labels into the selected language. The exception to this is the text written on images. However, keep in mind, the translation may not be perfect since everything is getting translated by a computer.
While this may put off some users, it will enable many others to make a purchase. Also, a lot of people are already accustomed to sites using translation APIs. They are used to imperfect translations. Since it is not a functionality issue, it will definitely not prevent them from making a purchase.
Walk
The “walk” step would involve doing some manual translating, such as site labels, but not translating everything.
Most labels in eCommerce sites are easily translatable. Moreover, the Clarity eCommerce platform already has translated labels in most of the popular languages. So when a user is going through your website, they can pick-up visual cues and get a general idea of what is going on even if they do not understand the language.
We think it is necessary to have the labels translated at the least. Otherwise, the user will be unable to navigate through your site.
Therefore the “walk” approach is very beneficial. It will ensure that everything on the site is accurately translated to the desired language. It will make the site easy to navigate and understand without involving any overhead and effort of converting all the product data and imagery.
Run
Naturally, this step involves translating every aspect of the site to the desired language. It may include any images and possibly the URL too, so it reflects the country’s domain.
You may set up a subdomain or a subdirectory. So anything a user enters in his browser using your domain, it automatically switches to that region’s native language. The user may switch back or switch to another language, but ideally, there should be a location detection system set in place.
A significant benefit of this kind of optimization is that it offers an exponential return if the site is getting considerable traffic in that locality.
As your site continue to grow in that locality, you can hire people who live in that region to audit/translate your site’s labels, product data, as well as any digital marketing content. Many businesses offer international eCommerce multilingual translation services. Clarity has set up its translation capabilities in a way that makes it possible for these external developers or agencies to fix translations and make changes.