Managing Multilingual Website Rollouts Is Easy with These Tips

The internet has helped business owners move far beyond the language barriers and allows websites to offer services to international audiences with multi-lingual solutions. But managing global websites can be a daunting task as it involves proper coordination among several departments and resources.

And if the parallel work-streams are not planned efficiently, then they can have a direct impact on the progress of the company.

Here in this blog, I will share with you some basic pointers that would help you with your multilingual website rollout planning as well as execution.

Consider the Local Market Requirements:

While dealing with many local markets, it is inevitable that there may be certain country specific requirements. There will also be some local functional and different legal requirements around the cookie storage or some other large and complex differences.

This will have an impact on how your products should be displayed on the site.

Another great way to deal with country specific changes for your multilingual website is to run a Digital Operations Service contract along the rollouts.

This will allow you to include support from your content team whenever there is any need of resources from the local market.

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Brand Governance in the Local Markets:

When you plan to target local markets with a multilingual website, it is often easy for an inexperienced person to get carried away and even upload some content that is below the quality that you expect as a brand.

There should be a level of control on the content and editors should have certain permissions to edit the text and overwrite the styles that is set by the original build.

You can tackle these issues with:

1. Training and Permission: Ensure that your content editors are trained and understand the proper procedure for asking a change request in case they want to add something new from what the site allows. Also use your CMS permission feature to ensure that the content is locked so that there is no unauthorized access and changes made.
2. Brand Guidelines: All your publishers, writers and editors should be aware of the guidelines about the tone of voice, brand use and other general content guidelines. It is also important that the key brand governance office reviews and then sign-offs the local site to ensure that the site is at par with the quality expected by the central team.

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Have Enough Signoff Time Both Locally and Centrally:

Creating quality content for your website is important and when you create a multilingual website, then each local market has to localize, translate and adapt.

Related Blog: Sitefinity 8.1 Makes Multilingual Site Management Easy For Business Owners

Each country is responsible to have appropriate content so there should be a level of sign-off from both the local market team and also the central team so as to ensure that the site is ready for the final public launch.

Every department can provide a simple checklist of points that need to be considered before the multilingual website is released that ensures the tasks like translated URLs, labels and keywords are complete.

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Translation and Localization Considerations:

There are now two approaches that are used while creating content for a global rollout of a multilingual site. The first one is an approach for the majority of the site to consider the English version.

Related Blog: Best Practices to Create a Multilingual Website for Your Business

This is then localized and also translated by each local country team.  The benefit is that, with the central sign off, each country targeted will have a fully functional English site at the starting point.

The second approach is that the local country will create their own content that is based on their local needs, but this often results in duplicate efforts and can also lead to issues related to branding and tone of voice consistency.