Thrudigital

Translation of a website is a good way to attract potential customers or visitors to your web presentation. Since English is generally the most common language on the internet, I’ll assume that you’re interested in other languages (and that your website is already available in English). However, translations are not cheap, thus your plan must be carefully thought-out. It’s easier when your website shows Google AdSense ads because you doesn’t need to worry about clients. Ads will be shown and sooner or later the investment will return. Everything is harder when translating an online shopping website, or a non-profit organisation.

Instead of giving you my opinions, let me demonstrate with a real example:

A long time ago I hired a woman to translate my website (once again, I’m talking about aqua-fish.net) from English into French. Due to lack of funds, the situation didn’t allow me to invest more than a few hundred dollars. However, it wasn’t possible to spend more for another reason: the translator was cheating on the translation, using an automated tool in the belief that I wouldn’t find out, as I don’t speak French. Eventually, I found out and stopped paying her. After a year, I decided to invest in another French translation, this time with an unrelated third party verifier. Before going into details regarding cost, here is the image showing the increase in traffic from France:

The highlighted column shows visits. The other columns are irrelevant to this example. So, the investment (approximately $3000) did drive some additional traffic to my website. Moreover, there is a continuing trend in this type of traffic, since many articles are still new (and some are not yet published), therefore they do not yet have a high position in Google.

Of course, the revenue has increased too. Due to the necessity of translating (and verifying) the existing articles, the whole revenue from the French version can be considered as part of the ROI. At this point, the ROI seems to be 2.05 years (nearly 25 months), which is actually very good. Naturally, the ROI on such an investment gets better as time goes by, because the older the articles are, the better the positions in search engines they acquire. So, if ROI was 25 months and not less, then it would be still a good business model.

Other major languages to consider are Spanish, Russian, German. Of course, the more articles, the better.

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