You want to translate your website or blog - what options are there?

 If you want to venture abroad with your blog or business, chances are that (especially if you are a Dutch person) it is necessary to translate your website into another language. Whether to German, French, English, Mandarin or all. With such a translation you can achieve a much wider reach, which is good for your business in many different ways. There are also plenty of ways to translate a website. Whether you do it manually, have a printout translated or even create one site in different languages, each way has its pros and cons. How do you get this done? We take a look at some of the best-known forms of website translation and tell you which form suits your business!

Translate via an export of your site

Perhaps not the easiest way, but for many entrepreneurs it is still a trusted solution: make a printout of all text from your website (to a PO or CSV file) and have it translated by a translation services in India. This is easy to do via a plugin for WordPress , Joomla , Drupal , Magento . The disadvantage of this is that afterwards the translated CSV file must be placed back in your website. After every adjustment / addition to your website, a new file must also be translated. However, if you want to translate your website without granting access , this is a good solution. 

Give the translator access to your website

This may sound a bit scary and is therefore less often chosen. But it is the easiest option and requires the least action on your part. That alone makes it attractive, right? It is also possible to give the translator access to a copy of your site, which gives you a little more security and confidence that nothing can happen to your original website. An additional advantage is that translating small additions to your site is done in no time. Not all translators offer this as a service.

Have it translated externally, without export or access

The most cumbersome but perhaps most secure and simplest way is to ask an agency to translate your website without access or export. Obviously, this involves a lot more work for a translation agency than translating with an export or access, and as a result, it quickly becomes the most expensive solution on this list. It remains that the content will have to be placed back, so that work remains!

Multiple websites or multilingual?

Regardless of the method chosen, a question remains, where both possible answers have pros and cons. Are you creating a different website for each language, or are you creating a  multilingual  website, in other words one website with different language modes? You can often recognize these sites by the flags in the header, which indicate the languages ​​into which the site has been translated. In general, you have a little SEO advantage when the domain name corresponds to the language area in question. Suppose your website is in Dutch and the domain name is yourwebsite.nl, if you want to translate the site into Spanish it can give an SEO advantage to use the domain name yourwebsite.es. In other cases, however, it is a better and more practical solution to go for a 'multilingual' solution, where your website becomes multilingual. For example, you will receive the Dutch texts on yourwebsite.nl and the Spanish translations on your website.nl/ES. There are various WordPress plugins with which you can set this up quite easily and a signal is also given to Google which language it is per page.

Enough options to make translating a  website easier, more difficult, cheaper or more expensive. Which option is ideal will differ per case and per niche. Experiences or tips in the field of translating blogs or websites? Share them in the comments!