Are you thinking of translating your website, but don’t know where to start? Follow our guide.

In the early days of the internet, websites were merely collections of pages, all written using a markup language known as HTML. Companies wanting a multilingual website simply needed to send us their HTML files for translation into all the desired languages.

While the underlying technology still uses HTML, the systems used to manage web pages have progressed enormously. Most sites now rely on a content management system (CMS), which typically use a database to store the text to be displayed. Further databases, particularly on e-commerce sites, can store information about the product lines to be featured. To ensure that foreign internet users can fully understand your website, all of this content that is hidden away in databases must be translated. It goes without saying that the translation should be carried out by a professional translator working into their native language.

So, how should you go about sending us the text to be translated? The basic principle is to use the functions of your content management system or your database to export the text in an appropriate format that will subsequently enable you to incorporate the translations without time-consuming copy and paste operations. We can cope with the vast majority of file formats, be they based on text files, XML, Word, Excel or other formats like the .mo files generated by modern CMS.