Best website translation tools for your enterprise in 2024

Choosing the best website translator for your business can be a real headache with so many translation tools available.

The growth of AI translation has made it even harder to figure out how to make sure you get a quality translation that’s on-brand but that doesn’t break the bank.

In this article, we’ll show you how to harness the powers of AI translation through your website content management system (CMS). You’ll be able to localize website content while staying on budget and accurately reflecting your brand in global markets.

Since many people use English for international commerce, you might think you don’t need to translate a website in English to another language. But to succeed in the global content economy, it’s essential to make your content available in other languages before your competitors do.

Under this pressure, some businesses that want to translate will latch on to the best free website translator they can find, such as Google Translate or DeepL. But running the content through machine translation and then putting the translated versions on your website without review is a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up with mistranslations, gender bias, and word choices that don’t reflect your company voice.

An on-brand, localized website makes all the difference to your potential customers in a new country:

• Reach your global audience in their language and context to make a real connection with them.

• Improve user experience from top of funnel to aftersales for happy customers.

• Enhance your brand reputation worldwide by reflecting quality in all aspects of your communications.

• Improve SEO performance for multilingual websites through well-thought-out optimization in the new languages.

• Adapt your website to local legislative requirements where necessary.

To successfully localize content for international markets, translation quality is critical. But it’s also important to consider all the other cultural factors and the technology involved.

Another vital factor is terminology management and glossary building in your website translation tool. This is crucial for maintaining consistency and achieving accurate translated content.

Make sure you choose website translation software that can handle the whole process from start to finish, and let you make updates later.

Look for an end-to-end translation management system like Smartcat for easy content management system (CMS) integration. Benefit from linguist procurement combined with automatic translations using AI translation tools, glossaries, and translation memory management.

Smartcat supports 280+ languages, and your linguists can easily edit translations and run quality assurance in our translation tool.

The ease of choosing a translation language in tools like Smartcat makes it simple to translate images and other content into various languages to make sure they appeal to local audiences.

The AI translation tool and post-editing tool should be compatible with glossaries and translation memories so you can ensure consistency, teach the AI to produce better translations first time around, and reuse past translations that have been edited.

Make sure the translation management system uses secure protocols and that you’re the only one with access to your data. Smartcat places prime importance on AI safety in translation services.

Recent improvements in AI translation quality mean that many businesses that want to translate websites choose an AI translation tool combined with human review.

• AI translation is a great solution to quickly produce a high-quality draft translation. In fact, at Smartcat, we're achieving 95%+ quality with AI.

• Human editing is the quality assurance step. Human reviewers can check your AI-translated content for accuracy, idiomaticity, grammar, brand voice, and terminological consistency.

This combination offers the speed of AI translation, the consistency of translation memories and translation glossaries, and the expertise of a vetted language professional.

Language delivery platforms like Smartcat let you seamlessly combine these services with your CMS. You can AI translate on our platform and then source reviewers through our linguist marketplace without the need to handle onboarding or procurement for contractors

Translating website content in Smartcat consists of four main steps.

1. Preparation: Select your target language or languages, choose which content you're going to translate, and set up your Smartcat account. Get a free trial.

2. Localization: Internationalize your design (think about language formats such as right-to-left languages), then translate and localize your content.

3. QA and testing: Bring in human reviewers to check translation quality then build and test your new website. Managing and reviewing translated content is crucial for quality assurance in language translations.

4. Optimization: Apply international SEO and keep your website translation updated.

To learn more about website localization, check out our step-by-step guide and checklist.

To successfully market a global brand through effective, controlled localization, start by using a translation management system (TMS) like Smartcat and not a free automatic translation plug-in.

The points below will help you choose the right TMS for your enterprise translation services.

By defining the goal of localizing your website, you’ll be able to work backwards to see all the different elements you need to consider.

Localization needs to be considered from the website design stage. Additionally, creating glossaries before you start translating sites will pay dividends. Consult a localization expert in the early stages to help you save time and budget.

The lure of free translation tools may tempt you to go crazy with Google Translate machine translation or to try out all of Smartcat’s 280+ languages in AI translation. However, successful localization requires careful budgetary planning.

It’s a team effort involving your website designers, copywriters, translators, and editors. Remember this when considering how many languages you’re prepared to budget for.

Make sure your translation tool supports all your existing systems. Smartcat supports more than 80 file types and integrates with numerous CMS platforms. In fact, if you can't find the integration you need, we can make a custom one for you.

Make sure your website translation tool is ready to support your growing international success and content needs. With Smartcat, you can store all your content in the cloud in translation memories and glossaries. It’s very easy to make updates and re-use past content. This can lead to considerable cost and time savings in the long term.

Make sure your chosen website translation tool has favorable reviews from companies similar to yours. Smartcat is trusted by Volvo, S&P Global, eBay, Mars, Boston Scientific, LG, and Clarins, to name but a few of our 1,000+ corporate clients. Find out how we helped Stanley Black & Decker cut translation costs by 70%.

Translation for localization happens from two angles: client-side and server-side. Client-side processes are actions the user can take to translate your website themselves, e.g., by using a browser plugin. Server-side processes refer to how you decide to localize the content on your website.

As an enterprise, you’re able to control the server-side processes. If you do this effectively, your potential customers won't need to resort to unedited automated translations.

Below are some technical options for translating the most popular website content CMS platforms.

You might be surprised to learn that you can now translate your website without any translation services, plugins, or add-ons. Smartcat AI website translator works with any CMS and delivers your AI translation in seconds.

1. Get fast, simple, high-quality AI translation. Automatically translate individual pages or your entire website into multiple languages.

2. Review and preview in live mode. Make any necessary edits to the target language and preview them right away.

Go multilingual in a few clicks. Embed a simple piece of JavaScript code to publish the translations.

There are several effective methods to translate WordPress websites. Here are some of the most popular.

The Smartcat WordPress translation plugin integrates Smartcat with WordPress via the WPML plugin. This powerful extension lets you translate pages, posts, custom types, taxonomy, menus, and theme texts and improve your website SEO.

Although you can use this plugin independently, using it inside Smartcat is much better. Here’s why:

• No need to leave the WordPress platform to process the translations.

• Content you want to translate is automatically sent between WordPress and Smartcat.

• Choose to localize all your content or part of it depending on the size of your website, time, and resources.

• Access to all Smartcat features not available in the plugin. These include Smartwords, industry leading translation engines, translation memories, the visual editor, and the linguist marketplace.

• Choose AI or human translation.

• Review translations in-house or by outsourcing to our linguists (no onboarding).

The GTranslate plugin uses the Google Translate automatic translation engine to translate WordPress sites. GTranslate offers 103 languages, which is almost three times fewer than Smartcat.

You generate the automatic translation and put it on your website without any brand adaptation, data security, image or layout localization, or quality assurance. It’s free but unsuitable for business use owing to the lack of control over the translation output.

TranslatePress is a translation tool that gives you the ability to quickly translate an entire webpage, including the output from short codes, forms, and page builders. It's also compatible with WooCommerce back-ends.

It uses Google Translate, and much like all the other free plugins, it’s only suitable if you aren’t worried about any type of quality assurance or consistency.

Smartcat has a wide range of plug-ins and integrations. This means its features are compatible with all the leading CMSs.

While free plugins and integrations are available for most CMSs, you’ll be dogged by the same quality problems mentioned above. Most free plugins connect to Google Translate, which produces generic machine translations.

If you generate any old machine translation and then put it directly on your website, you'll have no guarantees about what your brand is saying or how it’s coming across in the new markets.

Smartcat Website Translator gives you seamless, instant Wix webpage translation. Just plug it in, and you’ll be ready to AI-translate into 280+ languages.

Translate your Squarespace website into multiple languages quickly and accurately with the Smartcat Squarespace integration. Once you’re plugged in, you can translate text, image, and video content in minutes.

The Joomla extension works by linking your Joomla website to a Smartcat account and pushing the content for translation upon request. After the translation is done, it's automatically pulled back into Joomla.

Like with the WPML connector, you get all the features of Smartcat to ensure a top-quality website translation that is worthy of a global brand.

Connect Smartcat to your Drupal website via the very popular Translation Management Tool (TMGMT).

This module lets you enjoy TMGMT’s flexibility and translate content from a variety of external and internal sources without being limited by the number of automated scenarios.

If you’re looking for comprehensive website localization for your CMS system, Smartcat offers a wide variety of options:

• Fully featured integrations and connectors.

• Add-ons and integrations for automated translation.

• Professional human translation services without onboarding.

• Localization project management automation.

Get your free demo to discover how Smartcat’s translation tools can help your enterprise localize its website.