Multi-Language eCommerce - When and How to Localise Language for Key Markets

In the last 12 months, a considerably large (and increasing) focus of ours across the agency within both eCommerce and performance marketing is offering multi-language on-site, in order to provide an improved and more relatable experience for international customers.

Whilst historically it might have taken a significant amount of time to prepare a local version of a website from a technical perspective, most platforms have now created this functionality and moved it to configuration. The primary route would have been to manually translate an entire site, via freelancers or agencies, but there are now various options around full or partially automated translations.

The notion of rolling out multi-language at a surface level can be relatively quick, with a number of solutions democratising the ease of going from zero-live in a matter of hours by virtue of using automatic translations. Whilst not terrible, this isn’t optimal, particularly when approaching multi-language as a premium brand.

With this in mind, we explore how to navigate launching new languages on-site.

Why should you offer multiple languages?

To help quantify this answer more objectively, we’ve included and referenced some interesting data points below to provide some guidelines on the importance of international and localising online.

• 52% of websites are in English, but English reaches only 25% of global internet users.
• Approximately 75% of internet users don't speak English as their primary language.
• 56% of online customers said the ability to obtain information in their language is more important than price.
• Whilst rate of English literacy in Germany is relatively high, 55% of online consumers prefer to browse and buy exclusively in their native language.
• 65% of respondents prefer reading content in their language, even if it’s of poor quality.
• Italy, Spain, the Nordics and Japan are high growth regions across a number of brands.Typically a number of brands we work with offer totally localised experiences for markets such as Japan, offering local payment methods and cash on delivery. See Sunspel.jp for reference.

To go a little off-piste, though a great way to measure the demand for local language, we’ve seen examples with our app Census (a post purchase surveying tool) where brands have asked customers within the checkout if they’d like to shop in their native language. This question can be conditionally displayed based on shipping location (e.g. only ask a customer in Germany this question).

When should you be thinking about launching multiple languages?

A key consideration at the early stages of translating your store is resource: is resource available to facilitate manually translating and reviewing content with a native speaker?

Failing this, considering the brand's tone of voice and understanding if it is beneficial or damaging to the brand to launch with machine-translations is absolutely key. For premium brands especially, our recommendation would be to opt for leveraging a native speaker that can provide translation resources (be it internal or external) to ensure quality is upheld across all areas of the site.

Struggling to tap into a new international market can point to a number of factors; be it pricing, shipping, product or a million other reasons. We would recommend measuring impressions and traffic on-site by specific territory as a good means of quantifying if translations are a topic to strongly consider. If a considerable % of the metrics mentioned are from markets that have a tendency to shop in the local language. Ultimately the deciding factor here is discerning if translations are required to continue servicing existing demand, or to tap into new markets and build on demand internationally.

What are some key solutions?

TransPerfect

TransPerfect stands out for its comprehensive translation on-boarding and deployment process. It ensures that detailed documentation, including a clear glossary and style-guide, is available for future team members. This ensures consistency across the brand, irrespective of time and individuality.

The TransPerfect platform and solution is incredibly thorough and robust in ensuring optimal translation quality. This is divided into three steps:

• Building a glossary - this will typically factor in frequent on-site call to actions, phrases and terminologies used as well as how this input text is used onsite.
• Style guide - the TransPerfect style guide ensures brand tone of voice is captured (be it formal or informal, following clear linguistic rules to ensure optimal accuracy). This process comprises defining how specific facets of the site should be handled with regards to translation, e.g. do not translate product titles, localise colour names, local terminology (such as pants vs trousers, sneakers vs trainers), units of measurement and much more.
• Building translation memory - this feature is particularly important compared to more conventional translations tools. Building translation memory allows for linguistic variance. For example, translating ‘This item can be altered in-store by a professional’ as well as ‘This item can be altered in-store by a tailor’ would be fuzzy-matched, reducing time to translation and cost. This is particularly important at scale.

Once ready to go-live, following rounds of validation, the implementation is clean-cut with a snippet of code that is easy to install on-site. A final feature we really like with TransPerfect is their ODE Chrome plugin which allows for on-site translation editing, review, validation and publishing. This is something lower-tier platforms do not typically offer by default.

In terms of being a premium-brand, using a higher-tier service like a TransPerfect allows for a greater level of trust and increased agility in going live with on-site content and campaigns.

Lilt

There are some strong features within Lilt, particularly with AI being in the mix of considerations of brands looking to leverage automated translations. Typically most AI use with translations is layering tone of voice onto automatic translations from a service like Google Translate. Conversely, what Lilt does is analyse existing translations data ingested from a particular brand and their language and allows them to predict language with a greater degree of accuracy (based on translation memory similar to TransPerfect).

Weglot

Whilst definitely more platform agnostic than some of the other solutions included in this blog, with tried and tested integrations across a large number of platforms. Weglot is a strong contender amongst all levels of translation services, offering both lower to mid tier plans as well as Enterprise level integrations.

Whilst from a functionality perspective Weglot is not as strong as the aforementioned enterprise level platforms. Weglot counters this in abundance with both platform usability, ease of getting translations live as well as offering an easy way to allow teams to collaborate on translations within the platform. The servicing aspect of Weglot is also very strong, allowing for hiring professional translation help within the platform, an area where it feels like there’s certainly a shortage of reliable resources available at a competitive price. A particularly strong feature of Weglot is the ability to automatically translate content on the fly. For instance, if you launch a new product, no additional step is required to automatically ensure this is translated.

Shopify Translate & Adapt

The Shopify Translate & Adapt app is one we’ve seen discussed at depth and whilst there are several shortcomings for what is a relatively new release from Shopify, we expect this to improve significantly in the near future. What’s particularly key and important here is how integrated the app is and will be with markets as well as future Shopify deployments. Connecting a specific market or subdomain to a language couldn’t be easier with Translate & Adapt within the Shopify backend.

Currently Translate & Adapt allows for automatic translation of up to two languages of your choice, leveraging Google Translate technology. This content can be edited within either their backend user interface which allows for page or template level translations (as well as the native Shopify language strings) or a spreadsheet view if you’d prefer to export and translate en masse, before reimporting. Opting for the latter allows you to bulk find and replace particular repeated phrases and terminology (if opting for manual translation and enrichment) as well as opening up various other possibilities such as implementing an AI script within Google Sheets to vet and refine your translations.

As this app grows beyond offering more than two languages, it's important to consider that automatic translations beyond the current ‘out of the box’ functionality will be a billable service.

In addition to this, Translate & Adapt currently lacks the ability to automatically translate without a click, a point we touched upon earlier, which means any new content added on-site needs to be translated within the app automatically or manually.

Langify

Along similar lines to Shopify’s Translate & Adapt, Langify works in a similar way though is absolutely more user friendly than the current version of Translate & Adapt. This platform integrates well with the vast majority of third party applications (although this is a point always worth querying with support on either side). A feature of Langify we’re a particular fan of is the ability to easily edit unpublished themes and validate translations. This is an area Translate & Adapt is lacking in (though it is possible with some added difficulty locating and using). This is a feature that is often expected, particularly when working to tight deadlines and scheduled launches.

One key differentiating factor to consider between a more lightweight solution like Langify or Translate and Adapt is commercials, currently Langify bills at $5.00 per 10,000 words, so definitely consider your existing site word count. However, this point absolutely applies to all platforms before commiting to a platform in particular.

Key considerations for translations

Do you need automatic translations?

When weighing up the value of using automatic translations, most browsers natively allow for translation, typically this translated content will be very close to/if not the same as the local language you’d be showing on-site by default. Putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, this may not be too important.

Considering your paid media strategy and your product feeds

It is particularly useful for paid media teams that translations within the aforementioned Langify and Translate & Adapt apps are stored as native fields within Shopify.

This makes leveraging the translated content within most product feed and management platforms incredibly easy. Otherwise, with other solutions, you may find your existing feed management platform limiting if it cannot scrape on-site data, or use a supplemental feed from your chosen translation tool. This is a point definitely worth asking the question on when choosing a translation platform.

The influence of AI on translations

The topic of AI translations remains yet to be seen and truly tried and tested. In the realm of premium, we think this point is outstanding, as getting a brand's tone of voice and lexicon absolutely correct by automation will be increasingly difficult even with the use of AI. From a more zoomed out perspective, AI is rapidly improving so we expect within the near-future this will hugely streamline what is currently a laborious process.

Final thoughts

All of the above solutions mentioned are particular apps and integrations we frequently consider, though of course there are a large number of others that aren’t included. The key thing to consider when weighing up which platform is the best fit in simple measures boils down to the following:

• Do you have sufficient resources available to facilitate or guide the human element of translations?
• Are any language elements of your existing site or theme hardcoded? If this is the case, an app like Langify or Shopify Translate & Adapt may be less suitable without sufficient dev and translation resource.
• Do all existing integrations in your technology stack play fair with the languages you’d like to deploy on-site? A lot of the solutions mentioned will allow for free trials with automatic translations applied. This is a good way to do a quick spot analysis or site sweep to identify any gaps where translations are hard-coded or there is a lack of synergy between solutions. It is highly recommended carrying this step out as a first port of call when selecting a translation platform.
• Is this solution cost efficient at scale? Whilst a platform may be best-fit at present, consider the future when you’ve potentially scaled up and are considering deploying more content, products and campaigns, will pricing become excessive for the platform selected? Moving between translation platforms can be somewhat difficult so ensuring you’ve landed on the right choice is key.
• Finally, don’t be afraid to test first - using a more foundational translation solution as a proof of concept can be fine.

If you have any outstanding questions on this topic or would like to chat about this more, please feel free to message me on LinkedIn with any questions.