E-commerce is growing at a tremendous rate, making companies need a showcase to display their services and products in a timeless way. Nowadays it is not enough to have a simple website or blog; to stand out in the online market you will need to increase your positioning in search engines and translate your branding material to reach all nations, regardless of existing borders.

At this point we find ourselves at a crossroads: -go for the cheap and low quality, or for a translation made by professionals that will be a little more expensive, but that will deliver profitable results. These days we have to take good care of our investments and capital, hence the importance of being well informed before making such decisions. And that is exactly our job, to provide you with all the information needed to grow your business.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. Currently 82% of web users have made purchases in an international e-commerce. Of these, about 80% admit to losing confidence in businesses that present errors in translation and adaptation of languages. A survey carried out by Hexagone, howed that only in Spain, an 80% of le-commerces have important translation errors on their websites. This means that 3 out of 4 Spanish businesses have lost money for this reason alone, which has meant profit losses of up to 15% in sales. According to eleconomista.es, an online store with 10% of wrong words or experiences in the description of a product, or in the payment conditions, reduces your chances of sale by more than 20%.

Professional translation

For this reasons, it is pivotal that you hire services from a  professional translator. In this case, the phrase “you get what you pay for” applies. It must be taken into account that translation in this type of virtual business cannot be literal; many internal aspects of the country/countries of the target audience must be taken into consideration, such as their culture, the preferences of the customers in that place, and, of course, knowing those grammatical and linguistic turns. This process is called language localization. These kind of results can only be obtained by professional translators.

Common mistakes in website translations

Use of machine translators

This is the main mistake made by most websites. Although machine translators have evolved a lot, they still have problems adapting to many phrases, expressions and certain technicalities. In addition, they are not able to grasp the style, culture and tone of the brand, which is essential to connect with the users who visit your website.

Skip translation review in key sections of the website

Another common mistake is to focus the translation only on the product sale sections, forgetting important pages like the shopping cart, the purchase and return conditions, among others that, depending on the services you provide, will help you gain the trust of your customers.

Design alterations 

Some translations and adaptations to other languages often affect the design. New texts can alter the space they take up in containers, forms, buttons, depending on the language in which the inner text is written. Similarly, we can find this type of error in titles, navigation menus, links, fields to be filled in or footers, becoming illegible in the worst case scenario.

Forgetting updates

A good e-commerce requires keeping its contents updated. However, this has repercussions on the equivalent translation in other languages. You must ensure that the new contents inserted or updated have their respective translation in their international version. Remember, follow all the strategies to increase your brand´s positioning without forgetting one of the most important factors: translating your material properly.

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