Virtually any translation agency offers web site localization services for their clients. To claim their localization services more attractive for the client they usually underline that their translations will be adjusted according to the cultural background of the targeted audience - Internet surfers will browse your translated web site in their familiar cultural environment. Some of these companies even claim that they can develop a country-specific color scheme for translated web pages.
Q: Why did you decide to build your Russian web site?
A: Because you want to sell more!
Q: Do you need to place a photo of St. Basil Cathedral on your Russian web site to create Russian cultural environment to sell more?
A: NO!
Q: What do you need?
A: You need your Russian web site OPTIMIZED.
That’s what you need. Web site optimization is a part of translation work. While full-text optimization is hardly possible with certain web sites because it definitely requires content writing, which is usually planned long before one decides to translate their web site into one or more foreign languages.
What I usually do is a small keyword research which is a little bit tricky for the Russian language because the endings of nouns are grammatically dependent and those words and statements which are listed in keywords, title and description metatags section of the source (English, for example) have no case-dependent endings. So the translator will usually translate source keywords using nominative case. That is an erroneous approach - Russian Internet surfers are using genitive case very often. My translations are based on brief frequency analysis - thus making your web pages more visible in search results.
It is a known fact that the browsers are using different char sets in order to display pages of multilingual web sites correctly. In case of the Russian language there are two options: Windows-1251 and UTF-8. Those two options are equivalent, the most common one in the Russian Internet is Windows-1251. For multilingual web sites it is sometimes easier for the webmaster to define the whole portal as UTF-8, so you can ask me for any charset pre-defined.
I will also add a language-specific marker to the Russian pages of your web site thus making your marketing effort more findable on the Net.
Trados Tag Editor and translation memory is a very effective tool for web site localization since many items are usually repeated on web pages more than twice. One should not forget that web site is usually requires final cleanup in html management application thus reaching places which are not reachable from within Trados Tag Editor.
What is required when you order web site translation? First of all you should send the whole web site in a separate folder. You should include image folder for easier work.
What are the common problems encountered during web site localization?
Web sites built by frames technology. Not only they are not suitable for good ranking in search portals but are a real headache for the webmaster who finally discovers that translated text does not fit into the place thus smashing all his beautiful design.
Do-it-yourself web site optimization sequence
Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords
