You are about to launch your website for your Italian target audience. Great! Enter a new market is a challenging milestone that involves different steps, including translating and localizing all your online and offline content into your target audience language. When it comes to localizing your website, you should consider a few aspects and avoid others. Here you can find 5 common mistakes people usually make when translating their website:
1) Using machine translation for your content
I know it’s tempting and it seems the perfect choice to save time, but it will cost you lots of effort and money to fix it in the long run. Your website should convey your brand identity and your values through all your target markets (and languages) as well as your style and tone of voice. You need a professional able to translate your message from English into Italian, adapting the same emotions and feelings to the target culture.
2) Not adapting currency and time zone
When you sell products or services in a new country, it’s important to set the right currency and time zone as well. Euros, Pounds, Dollars: each country uses different currencies and has its preferred method of payment. Besides Paypal, people use also Satispay or Postepay in Italy. And remember while the UK and the US use a comma to separate groups of thousands and a full stop as a decimal separator, Italy, like many other countries, do the exact opposite.
3) Forgetting about FAQs
The FAQs section is one of the most important of your website where your customers can easily find the answers to their doubts or questions. This content is really valuable and it should be translated and adapted for your Italian audience as well. You can add information about shipping conditions and costs, returns and refund policy.
4) Translating irrelevant content for your Italian audience
You don’t need to translate all your website content into your target language. There are some sections, posts or pieces of information which aren’t useful for your Italian customers. You can simply skip them or change them with more targeted content.
4) Leaving the blog content only in English
Your blog is a real asset for your website because your potential customers can find you on Google through online searching. An SEO-optimized website can boost your leads turning them into customers.
Do you know other common mistakes when translating your website?
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