Landing Page Translation in 2018
Hello everyone, my name is Alex and I’m the Founder of Translation Cloud. We’ve just posted a video to YouTube on landing page translation in 2018.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a simplified version of your website with the purpose of conveying what you’re offering in an attractive way. It should be measurable, understandable, have a price on it, and a solid call to action that implies: “contact us, submit the form, and we will get back to you.” The purpose of the landing page is to attract new customers, but more importantly to get their contact information: their name, phone number, and email.
The three types of landing pages.
1. The simple one-pager.
This type of landing page is literally only one page, with simplified navigation only to sub-sections within the same page. It looks like a long, crawlable list of ideas and sales pitches.
2. The multi-page landing page.
It’s not a full-fledged website, but still has your main ideas and keywords conveyed throughout. The first page could be “about us” and the second page could be pricing, packages, and so on.
3. A landing page as a sub page of your main website.
If you have a long established website, or a large corporate site with lots of links to HR and other departments, various policies, and so on, the landing page can be just one of the many sub pages. One drawback of this approach is that it typically must look integrated into your main site’s design and feel, which may be distracting when trying to convey a simple message to your users.
The old method for translating your landing page.
Your landing page will typically consist of layout elements such as a header and footer, the title and description, body text, images and graphs, buttons, JavaScript elements for interactivity, dynamic text, and web forms. All of these elements need to be addressed by someone. In the past, this would be a specialized translator who, in addition to knowing the language you need translated, would also have to know how to interpret all the intricacies of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you could find such a person, you would delegate the job of translating your landing page entirely to them. This is a very rare individual, and typically not an actual translator but (more often) a bilingual coder—a totally different skill. A bilingual person, unlike a professional translator, lacks the training, experience, and ability to convey the exact meaning of important text flawlessly, particularly for technical, medical, and other specialized fields.
Translating your landing page in 2018
Today, there are now more options for translating your landing page. The whole process can expedited by utilizing machine translation such as Google Translate, Bing Translator, or Yandex Translate. Machine translation works in the background (through an application programming interface, or API) and the translation process itself is seamless, but at the real cost is in the quality of the translated text. As business owner, this is important—your landing page is deployed for a specific purpose, and if your target audience reads or feels errors in the landing page, they will be less likely to convert into paying customers. If you are spending money on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook for ads directing people to your landing page, but your conversion rate is small because no one trusts your page, your product will not take off and you will have spent a lot of effort on very little result. Remember: a machine translation may look good to you, but in reality for foreign visitors it may not a good landing page experience.
The best method of landing page translation.
Luckily, there is yet another solution that combines the best of both worlds. The hybrid method begins by having your webmaster (or a specialized translation firm who can help you manage the process) employ a team of translators to look at the machine translation to determine what looks correct and what looks funny, and edit the translation. This hybrid approach allows you to get a very quick result from the machine translation, with polished results from professional, human translators.
And since your landing page contains just the essential meaning of your product or service, you can focus on translating just it and not your entire website. Convey what you’re offering, deploy it quickly, throw a marketing budget at it, and you will see the conversions. Your sales team can follow up on the leads and hopefully close on the deal. This is how business grows: by acquiring new customers. Translation of landing pages is a step in the right direction.
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