By Louise Taylor
If you run a blog, chances are you’d like to grow your audience. After all, what blog owner has ever wished they could have fewer followers? A great way to grow your audience is to use a translation service to translate your blog into another language. By doing so, you’re opening up your blog to a whole new audience.
An article on Quicksprout detailed how a website owner increased his search traffic 47 percent by translating his site into 82 different languages. However, you don’t have to be quite so ambitious to enjoy the advantages of blog translation! You may just want to start by trying out a second language and by localizing your content.
Below we’ll cover how to tap into other markets by translating your blog into another language. But don’t worry, you don’t actually have to speak the other language yourself to create a dual-language blog.
Why Get a Dual-Language Blog from a Translation Service?
There’s no denying that the translation and localization of your blog is likely a large undertaking. But it might just be worth it, as we can see from certain demographics in the U.S. As of 2016, over 18 percent of the population in the U.S. was Hispanic. Certain states hovered around one-third of the population being Hispanic. In New Mexico, it went all the way up to 48 percent, and to 39 percent in California.
Spanish is the second most-used language in the U.S. A whopping 40 million people speak Spanish at home in the U.S. So, if you want to reach a larger audience for your blog, translating it into Spanish might be a good investment.
Another reason for translating a blog could be that you cover a certain topic that happens to be popular in another part of the world. As an example, you might run a blog about heavy metal bands. Metal is a popular type of music in the Scandinavian parts of the world, so you might look into getting a professional translator to translate your blog into languages from those countries.
It all comes back to optimizing your blog to reach the greatest numbers of readers, while allowing your readers to know that you literally speak their language and are willing to meet them on their own turf.
The localization part of the process can be tricky, so we’ll discuss that next.
The Importance of Localization Services
When you run a blog, you already have enough on your plate. Between writing posts, tracking website statistics and responding to your readers, it can feel like localization is one more hassle you don’t need. As such, to save yourself time, try sourcing localization services and translation services at the same time.
Localization services are necessary to make sure you do not offend your audience. Localization can be difficult. Different regions use different dialects that you might not be familiar with yourself, even if you do speak a second language. There are also a range of cultural sensitivities must be taken into account when localizing content, which are best known by natives of the country in question.
Messing up a translation can be embarrassing. Taking a website or company to task for screwing up a translation is a major pastime on the internet, as you can see in all the translation fail articles available online. A localization service is the professional way to avoid such translation pitfalls.
How to Work with a Professional Translator
Working with a professional translator can feel daunting at first. But once you find someone you are a good fit with, the process can be wonderfully smooth.
While looking for a professional translator, translation service or localization service, the first step is to make sure they have experience translating blogs. There are all kinds of things that need translating, so different translators tend to have different types of work they focus on.
Translating and working with the localization of blogs and other websites requires a different set of skills than audio translations or book translations. The professional translator may have to handle digital ad localization, translating blogs posts so they read well online and for the local culture, and even logo redesign.
The second biggest concern is to make sure the native translator is easy to work with. They should be an open communicator who is willing to listen to instructions and corrections.
What many people don’t realize when they are working with professional translators is that it is a two-way street. You do not submit a blog post and get it back perfectly translated without being a part of that process. The translation may take some tweaking in order to perfectly meet your goals. Communication, as well as instruction beforehand detailing some of what you want, is an essential part of this process.
By finding languages services that fit the needs of your blog, you could open your website up to whole new audiences. With the right translation support you can run a dual-language blog even if you don’t speak a single word of the second language.
