If you’re planning on deploying a landing page or minisite in another language, this post will offer some interesting options to get you up and running in no time. You’re most likely looking to either: Test a single or range of foreign markets Market a product in a foreign market Where to start This can be done by creating new pages in a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress, or even by hand in HTML/CSS.
There are many ways to make your Wordpress site multilingual. I’ll run through a few options in this post, and offer some alternatives for multilingual sites. Best translation service and plugin options Polylang - https://wordpress.org/plugins/polylang/ This is an open source project, with largely positive reviews and a host of well-designed features. WeGlot - https://wordpress.org/plugins/weglot/ A commercial offer from the WeGlot company, you can translate up to 2000 words for free using their system.
Wordreference is another of those useful resources for translators and language workers. It offers a complete online dictionary in many languages, backed by a forum for the terms that don’t appear in its listings. It can often be lacking in technical terms, where a more robust term search might be more useful, but as a starting point for idiom and day-to-day terms used it can be very useful. As there is little context it can be hard to be certain of which meaning should be used, but overall it’s a very useful tool for a quick check.
There are a number of extremely useful resources for translators and anyone working with foreign languages. From dictionary lookups to entire gist translations, there are a range of advertising-funded options freely available to use. Well, at the cost of tracking your internet use, but free apart from that. Linguee is one of those. It is a service that combines bilingual texts, highlighting your search word in both languages, over a range of contexts.
You’re in search of a translation agency, one you can pick up the phone and pitch questions to at any time during the project. Ideally one you can meet in person before you begin. You’re based in London and you’d ideally start your search there. But how necessary is it to restrict your search to a 25 mile radius? Not at all, I’d suggest. You see, we often work with clients at either end of the country and have no trouble communicating by phone and email with the very occasional face-to-face to clarify project start/delivery issues.
It can be tough to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to comparing translation services found online. After all, anyone can throw up a website. That said, there are a few pointers that can help you to start to pick a suitable translation provider, be they agency or freelancer. Indemnity insurance. Providers such as Hiscox in the UK provide policies for language services. Real address, displayed prominently, along with landline phone number.
A brief update on our move, from Melbourne to Derby. We’re now at Marble Hall, in Derby, part of the Connect Derby buildings run by the council. It’s the old Rolls Royce factory and has had a complete refurb, only the boardrooms and certain parts of the building remain original. The move should help provide everything we need to meet and connect with more local businesses. All being well we should keep growing through this period.
In our last site update we got rid of the blog to keep the site simple, clean and focused. However, being the translators (and ever-aspiring writers) we are, we’ve decided to bring it back to life so as to allow ourselves a little creative expression, all while communicating with our good readers; those interested in the world of translation, technology and business. For the nerderati out there, we’ve used a static site generator (as we have for the main site) called Hugo, running on Nginx.
World to Writers, (Accentor Ltd. 07476048), Marble Hall, 80 Nightingale Road, Derby DE24 8BF
