This workshop is a practical guide to scoping a translation project, integrating the process with a web CMS, and managing the different functions with minimal risk. Head of Product at Smartcat, Igor Afanasyev, Expert Community Development Lead at Codeable, Mike Demopoulos, and Search Engine Optimization Manager, Nadia Anagnostopoulou, provide first-hand information on managing large-scale websites across numerous languages and demographics, all while driving revenue.
Transcription
Colman Murphy 00:00
Hey, well, we do have a pretty packed agenda for today. So I'm gonna get right into it. As I said, my name is Coleman Murphy. I'm with the smartcard marketing team. We've got a great panel today of Nadia, Mike and Igor. And let's get into what we're going to cover in this webinar. The general topic is helping organizations plan for a successful website translation project in order to not run into problems. And we've got examples of things that you might not necessarily think about initially when you're going through the scoping process. But just the overall function of scoping is a big piece of this. Nadia is going to cover what they had welcomed pick ups did in order to help them achieve their goals. And then we're going to get into the processes and the technical elements of actually translating your website, whether that's the localization translation platform, like what SmartCAT offers, or the actual CMS itself that you have running in the background, and the ways that those interacting can impact your your overall business. And throughout all of this, we want to make sure that we're capturing your input. Ideally, if you can hold your questions to the end, and submit them using the q&a function, that will be great. We will keep an eye on the q&a throughout the webinar. So if there are questions that are very timely and topical, we will address them live. But with that, let's, let's get into introducing our speakers. And I'm gonna turn it over to Nadia to quickly introduce herself.
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 01:40
Hello, everyone. My name is Nadia. I'm a digital marketing manager at Volcom pickups. And I'm in charge of content SEO as well as localization. Welcome.
Colman Murphy 01:54
Great, thank you. I think Mike is still having problems joining. Mica you online? I guess not. Okay. All right, Igor.
Igor Afanasyev 02:08
Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is Igor. I am a product director at SmartCAT. My speciality as SmartCAT is things related to automation integrations, website translation, as well. So I'm really happy to be here on this webinar today.
Colman Murphy 02:23
Great, thanks, eager. Well, let's get into it.
Igor Afanasyev 02:38
All right. Let me start with some of the introduction, questions and introduction, topics that many of you have when you just start thinking of translating your website. And I've seen several times that people tend to jump into more technical questions first, before answering the the main questions. They started saying, like when they discuss things internally, when they want to have a multilingual website, they started seeing how many languages they need to support and like different technologies and how to slice and dice the work like getting right into the into the implementation details. What is really important to do first is to ask the questions of why we're doing this in the first place. Who is our target audience? And what do they care about? Like you need to define your budget and timeframe because this largely affects all of the technical questions that you will have up front of you. And most importantly, how do we measure success? The thing is that localization translation is usually treated in companies as a cost center. And if you think about like, we need to hire someone to do something, we need to like to implement the technical side of things, we need to hire someone to do the translations, etc. You're starting thinking, again, as of localization being the cost center. Now, if you have a way to measure success, if you have a way to talk to others, who are doing the same thing and creating multiple websites and their experience, you might be able to turn things around and the proper way, which is identifying how your multilingual Website Translator will bring in more visitors, like more, more business basically. And if that's the case, and if you can provide them a compelling story and you can validate it against your metrics, it will be much easier for you to expand to choose the proper implementation timeline and proper budget. But these are once you have those, those kind of set before you and answer then I think Nadia will provide some of the insights on how they did that. Welcome pickups, you will only then go into the technical details. And me being the technical person. Go to the next slide quantities. I know that there are so many technical things that you will then need to decide once you have the first questions answered. When it comes to languages, it's not only about how many languages you want to support, do you want your website to be just multilingual support multiple languages, or multiregional, tailored to different regions? And with that comes the other question, do you want to have like for your product, some local pricing some local content, how different that content should be, as compared to your base, your base language. Based on that you will be taking the different technologies, different different processes and making sure that what you're building actually will fit your needs. When it comes to budget, you can suddenly realize that you don't have the budget to translate everything at once. And timing wise, you are not able to do some coordinated releases in all languages, it might be delaying your normal workflows for the main language that you have. So you need to understand whether you want to have those coordinated releases or not do you want them to be like staggered or independent entirely. And when it comes to budget optimization, there are multiple things to consider. If your website is already large, then you might want to do some translate some subsections of the website, how do you decide what to translate first? Do you have a tiered approach to pages, for example, where you have most important pages that you want to translate into all languages, while others should be treated somewhat differently? Or do you do it your approach approach to languages and then treat certain important languages where you're present, or want to be to have a good presence in the market as a tier one languages? And then everything else falls into other tiers? How do you approach different types of content? Do you have like just just a marketing website? Or some portions of that is, I don't know, support content? Something that can be translated automatically, for example? Or do you want to translate everything with human review? Which is the most expensive within the work that takes most of the time? Or do you want to have a mixed approach? Those are business questions, but they also affect the technical implementation. Finally, do you have all the necessary skills to the resources? Or do you want to outsource that to some company that can guide you through those throws through those technical things? Do you want to do the translations yourself by in house specialists, but your local marketing teams for example, what do you want to outsource that as well? So these are all of the questions that you will need to answer by yourself. And with that, we can hand it over to Nadia.
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 08:08
Let me start by introducing the company. Welcome pickups is rapidly growing travel technology startup. Our services are available in 40 Different countries at the moment, and our website is at least partially translated in 12 languages. After ads, organic traffic is our biggest channel. So we are highly dependent on website engagement and conversion. And if we move to next slide, come on please. So I joined welcome pickups in January 2020, in order to lead content production and to set up a localization process for the entire organization. At the time, there was no clear owner of the localization process. But there was a clear understanding that it was imperative for the company's rapid growth. But up to that point was done a little haphazardly and ad hoc. There were also no measures of success and no goal set. So we didn't know how are how to measure if a localization strategy is actually successful. Everything was done manually and directly in WordPress. That means the translators were creating and editing the language pages while having the English page kind of somewhere for reference, which obviously is something that has several disadvantages, just to name a couple, for the audience, much bigger possibility for human error. For example, suddenly, someone accidentally deletes a page that we need in English or accidentally replaces a text of the English page instead of creating a new page for translation. And it also means that translators have had to be granted a quite high level of access to our website back Canada, which is a security threat. And we needed to avoid that. Another challenge that we had at the time was that the translation for our product was done as a completely separate project, from the website with different goals set by the product team, different processes, and different rules. And there were no said, assets between our kind of website translation and our product. And finally, though, there were no glossaries, no translation memories, no QA process. That means it was difficult to calculate a cost per page or and there were no cost savings. So we needed a lot of kind of copying and pasting and a lot of stress to the translators, that they're going to give us the actual numbers for what they worked on. There were no cost savings from repeated content, since it was not translation memory. And most importantly, there was no way to check or to guarantee consistency in translation. And, of course, no way to measure the quality of what we call as a result. So in order to set up a localization, strategy and process, we had to start with the basics, we didn't really have much to work on at the time. So we started by separating the content that we have on the website into pillars, which is what Igor mentioned earlier. So in terms of importance, like what is the most important content and what can wait for later. And we also separated the languages that we support in tears in terms of big, medium and small markets. The next step was to define our localization goals and how we will measure success. In our case, we settled for the increase of bookings coming through localize pages for our tier one languages, as our measure for 2022. And the next step was to recruit and train language leads for each of the languages for tier one that we were going to work on. And this is in order to have an accountable person and a gatekeeper for the quality for each language. The I would say that the hardest parts over Jenny was what you see as step five on the slide, which is selecting the translation tool that would consolidate website and UI translation together for us, as many tools can do both equally well, or they can only do one or or the other. And our final step for our setup was to build a glossary and translation memory from our older translations that we could use going forward. We did have a few non obvious challenges in this process. So the first one was that many tools couldn't support the additional plugins that we use on WordPress in order to create customized landing pages. And Smartlist seemed to be the only tool that did that out of the box. This was a very important factor for us why we went with with market as our to. Our second challenge was that we update our content quite often. So we needed a way to track which translations need to be updated. With our old process that was quite hard. But thankfully, with smackers continuous localization process that is quite effortless. So everything is updated in our projects, once English is updated, our projects updated automatically, and we know what we need to update for translation. And our third and biggest challenge was that on third month of building our localization strategy, we had the sort of global pandemic and being a company in the travel industry that resulted to our budget being cut considerably. So most of our localization budget was now gone into thin air and we had to work with a lot less and make it happen with a lot less than we had before. And so while we had, it took us a long time to set everything up a lot longer than we expected to have an infrastructure and to be able to say that we have a solid working process for localization. But in early 2022, we started working on a continuous localization process with this market team. And here we can see the results of what we've got so far. So in 2022, so far, we've managed to cut our time to market in half. This means that from the moment the English content is published, to the moment that the localized version is published on our website, this now happens in half the time that it did before. We have saved it Around $32,000 from using SmartCAT. This is the savings we have from the translation memory, we have managed to increase our bookings that come from our localized pages on our website by 66%, compared to pre pandemic levels, and we also have increased the revenue that comes from those bookings by a 2% compared to pre pandemic level levels. And what are we going to do next in terms of localization in 2022, and beyond, we are currently in the final stages of setting up our continuous localization process with SmartCAT. And this map has technical team has been invaluable in helping us doing that we had a lot of snags along the way, a lot of technical considerations due to our customization. But we have now sold all this, it's all working fine. So we're kind of going ahead with us. And now that it's set up, we are going to identify very easily if we have any missing translations 41 languages have been wanting to complete by the end of this year for our website. And the next step in 2023, is to expand our localization program to our tier two languages and to measure the impact of those translations as well. I think that's all for me.
Colman Murphy 16:25
Thanks, Nadia. That's super helpful. So let's move on to talking about what it is technically, that's taking place on the back end, when it comes time to translating your website is we've we've seen coverage of the UI, the website, but also we know that there's a lot of back end processes and management of the process that needs to Mr. TechBase. So he is going to walk us through a couple of different approaches. And then we're going to talk about some of the technical elements of WordPress, specifically, but any CMS that you might need to consider.
Igor Afanasyev 17:03
Thank you, Colin. Yeah, when it comes to implementing the technical side of website translation, there are two major, major approaches that you can take for that. And they are depicted on the left and on the right on the left is like CMS aware approach, if you will, which means that your translation memory system trajection measurement system, for example, SmartCAT, or something else needs to connect to be able to connect directly to that CMS in order to get to stable content from that, send that for translation to all of the loading needed workflow steps, and then push the translations back into that CMS. And then CMS by itself decides how to render itself to the user. So what people are seeing in the browser is the is the end result of a CMS serving and multilingual content. In that case, CMS must support multilingual content, it must understand how to serve the proper part of the website to that user depending on their preferred language that is set in the browser, etc. This approach allows you to implement really interesting scenarios such as continuous localization that Nadia was talking about when translation measurement system can constantly monitor the differences, the changes that were introduced in the CMS, expose them for translation, and then push translations back live so that it really simplifies the way how you're dealing with the content. Those, those approaches require a translation management system to have a dedicated connector to each of the CMS that's out there. And when you're deciding on what CMS to use, also see what translation management system you will use and how well it supports your CMS. And its markup. We support a bunch of different CMS, we can support all of them that that's impossible and that's like the downside of that approach, if you will, but we do support like most popular of our, of our connectors are for Contentful for Drupal, and then for WordPress. We will talk about WordPress a bit later. One of the things is that WordPress by itself does not support multilingual it but it has a very good solid solution. third party solution that was built on top of that and we support that as well. And I know that Mike demo has joined so the last slide you will be probably focusing on that particular aspect of WordPress. When it comes to the other solution that is depicted on the right. It is cms second elastic. What that means is that with this approach, it doesn't matter which CMS you're using. CMS just continues to think that it works with one single language and serves that to the user in the browser. But on top of that, there is a technical solution that allows you to serve multilingual content, like being replaced in real time for that user. So there's certain translation layer that happens between the user within the user and the CMS, which is the translation layer. And this is what is being connected to the translation management system. Those those approaches are, can be divided into this approach can be divided into two different themes, if you will, translation can be happening on the client side. So right in the browser, similar to what you could see when you're using Google Translate button only on someone's website, when it goes through that content that is displayed on the browser and then replaces the translations, the source with translations. And then the other approach is a server side side, one that proxy one, it allows, it requires someone to go to dedicated domain, for example, instead of example, a comm being your, your website, you will go to d.example.com to see the German version of that. So this happens on the server side. It has its its pros and cons. At SmartCAT. We do support the client side translation, the technology that we call Website Translator, which is really great for for websites that need to be translated automatically documentation website, etc. And it's really easy to set up. But today since we have Mike, with us, we will talk about WordPress specifically, if you decide to use WordPress, this is a CMS. What that means. Like, let's go ahead, yes,
Mike Demopoulos 22:04
thank you. Sorry for my absence earlier, I had some technical issues. So when you're when you are deciding on me, my videos not working. That's nice, wonderful. Well, we'll just deal with audio. When you're deciding which content management system to use, you might be wondering if you want to use a closed source system, such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, you know, all those kind of ads you see on TV and during the Superbowl. Or if you want to use an open source content management system, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress being the most popular content management system on the planet, it beats all those closed source solutions. The main thing that you want to think about when you're considering closed source versus open source is who's building your site. If you're building it with an agency or in house, you probably want to use an open source CMS because you want to be able to have someone else pick up that code very easily, where it closer CMS, you have less flexibility with that. Also, the content restrictions on if you decide you want to move from one product to another. As far as localization goes, they all kind of vary differently. But the open source ones gives you more flexibility in how you do the localization. For example, if you want to use a sub domain for your localization, like es.yourdomain.com for Spanish, you can do that a lot easier with the open source solutions. You can also do that with sub folders so you can do yourdomain.com/yes or whatever you're trying to do. Did all those solutions have different SEO implementations and your SEO specialists can help you strategize what kind of works there. When you are considering if you want to use a open source CMS like Wordpress, you are going to want to decide if you want to use a managed host or a self host yourself. A managed host such as WP Engine will do things like setup WordPress for you. And it makes sure that the updates are done and everything's good to go. This side effect of that is the cost is significantly higher someone's upwards of five to 10 times as high as finding your own host. However, they're going to make sure that your site is up to date and is good to go. You might have restriction some of the Manage host restrict certain types of plugins. You won't have any issues with SmartCAT SmartCAT or WP ml which is the WordPress add on the SmartCAT integrates with but some more niche plugins they might not allow on their platform. Self hosting you can find anywhere. Also want to make sure you host in a region that your clients are in. So if your clients in the EU You find a host in the EU if they're in the US host in the US. And last but not least, internal expertise for outsourced management. If you decide to use an agency, please make sure the agency knows WordPress. If you're doing an internal, make sure that the higher makes sense if it's just to build the initial intro, please make sure that you actually have enough work for that person to do it us at codable, where WordPress agency, you can hire us by the hour. And that's not and there's lots of agencies like this. And there's also other hourly platforms. And last but not least, if you do choose WordPress, it's out there, you're gonna be able to find a WordPress pro easily. There are 10s of 1000s of WordPress professionals out there. And you can take the work and the code that someone else has done, and have it be built off by somebody very easily locally, or online. Depending on what you want to do. It can be a little challenging to configure for multilingual sites, especially if you have products because you don't just have multilingual, then you also have currency translation, you know, conversion at the same time. So that's a quick overview of pick the right CMS on take a hard look at open source. It's probably going to be the cheapest long term, but a little more expensive at the beginning. All
Colman Murphy 26:28
right. Thank you, Mike. And thank you for for joining us. Sorry, you've been having all of these technical issues. And just can you take another 15 seconds and just introduce yourself and, and your company?
Mike Demopoulos 26:41
Sure. And again, I apologize as you can see by the camera not working. It's been a weird morning. My name is Mike demo. I'm the expert community development lead at codable. COBOL is the world's largest word trance WordPress Freelancer platform. We're kinda like Upwork. But 100% focused on WordPress, we have 750,000 WordPress professionals that help our 25,000 clients on small projects to big fortune 500 integrations.
Colman Murphy 27:13
Great, thank you. All right. And we are bang on schedule. We can now we are well, we're very happy to open it up for for questions right now. So use the q&a function. If you have any questions, please submit them through that button right now. And we'll start taking those. I do have one question. What? And this is for you eager. Can you explain again in a little more detail? What's the difference between the two models for website translation? And how does how did they interact with WordPress? And I can go back to that slide if that helps.
Igor Afanasyev 27:59
Yeah, of course. So technically, if you have a WordPress website, you can choose to use either of those approaches, whether it would be CMS agnostic that doesn't know that behind the scenes, there's a WordPress site running. And then you could have a setup that connects directly to your WordPress. Now when we're talking about WordPress, it has since it's an open source technology, as Mike mentioned, there are so many different plugins out there so there's no like liquid snowflakes are no too slick. Same installations of WordPress. When it comes to like real production websites, everybody wants to enhance it like use their own theme use their own set of plugins etc. And this can be challenging when it comes to translation. WordPress has a plugin system that provides this multilingual ality layer, which is WP ml stat which stands for WordPress, multilingual, they allow you could have different posts in different languages, and also have some compatibility with certain plugins. But sometimes you have something like you already had a website and now you're deciding to do the to do the translations. And you realize that this is not something supported by WP ml or by the other like translation measurement system that you're planning to do planning to use. And in that case, the only way for you to do to quickly do the translations is to use this CMS agnostic approach where you do something on top of your already rendered website to serve that to multiple users. That's like the process If that is that it doesn't care which plugins you use, whether you're using the WP ml on top of WordPress or not. But the downsides of that is this technology is not really for dynamic websites. For example, as Mike mentioned, if you have some products if you want to not only just to translate the content, but also to localize prices to do multi regional support, if you want your content to be different and different for different regions, not just translated, but have something, some customizations on top of that, so that technology will not allow you to, to do those customizations, whereas connecting to CMS directly gives you precise control of what is the source content that is used to build that website. So you can go and you know, like harvest all of those pieces from different from different posts and pages and different like plugin content, different fields, etc. Send that for translation, and put that back. So in the longer term, the approach to the left, which is aware of which CMS you're using is better from the technical perspective, but it will have more upfront investment.
Colman Murphy 31:22
Right. All right. We've got two related questions here, both for Nadia. The first one is welcome pickups working with in house linguistics, freelancers, or translation agencies. And then the second part is why did you choose this approach?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 31:42
Okay, yeah, um, so we don't work with translation agencies. The reason is that being a translation, sorry, I technology company, we, we have the skills in house to the technical skills to set up a process ourselves. So we also wanted to have a kind of more direct relationship with the people that write our content. It's very specific, it's for SEO targeted, we wanted to be able to train people on exactly how we want them to do it. So we work directly with freelancers. But we do have an accountable language lead for each of the languages we translate into. So that person is responsible for the quality of everything that we put out. They're also checking the work of the other translators. And if we want to recruit new people, then we would go to, to our accountable lead to check the quality of whoever we're testing to add to our team.
Colman Murphy 32:48
Great, thank you. And then on the back end. So you've you've got WordPress running, but then you also have SmartCAT SmartCAT manages basically the project related to the translations, right? Yes,
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 33:01
so all our translations are done via SmartCAT. And we have our team like of translators working in SmartCAT. And most of our communication happens on the tool as well. Any questions that they have for us, they ask within SmartCAT. So all that is run quite smoothly on the platform. And I don't know if people are aware of that here. But I think that, like smarter also has a marketplace. So there's another option to help you find translators, if you want to add more to your team is to go to this market marketplace and find me all.
Colman Murphy 33:42
Right, and we have a question for UC Santa, you're going to ask it live. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 33:50
yeah, I'm gonna take advantage of my position. Hi, guys. I'm Oksana, let's target him. And I do have a question for you. When you were presenting your case of your company, you mentioned that for some languages, you decided to localize only the website, the content only partially. Could you please elaborate how how it was executed? Or how do you make the choice? What should be localized on that?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 34:25
Yeah, okay. As I mentioned, we we separated languages in tears. So our kind of the biggest markets of medium markets and a small market. And so after that, it's basically a business question. Which market do you want to put more effort and more resources in? But for the ones that we have partially translated the website? It depends because we work in travel, we are in different countries in different markets. So it has to do with where people travel from which markets. I don't know if that makes sense. What I mean so or it's people from one region might be traveling more to one region, but not another one. So we would give priority to the region where that language is needed more.
Unknown Speaker 35:10
I see. So you were choosing like a certain type of content or certain pages? Yeah. Okay. If it possible, could you respond? What were the basis for the choices?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 35:25
Sorry, could you ask again?
Unknown Speaker 35:29
What were the arguments for you to translate a certain to localize a certain type of content, a certain certain type of pages?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 35:37
Yeah. So it's, as I said, it's, it's kind of a business decision. So for example, if people from France travel in a particular country, and we have pages related to that country, then we'll translate. Oh, I see. Sales. Yeah. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 35:54
I see now. Thank you for the example. Yeah, they will
Colman Murphy 35:56
come. Right. All right. So we've got we're just about a time we had scheduled this for 40 minutes. But if there are any other questions, I would love to capture those. Now we can. Also, if we don't have time to answer them completely. Now we can share them in the transcript once we're done. But if you have any other questions about either different platforms, the overall process, the translation systems and the back end, please go ahead and enter them in the q&a now. Okay, we've got one last question on the justification, far. translation system or translating your website? Igor, you talked about building a business case, Nadia, what was the business case that was yours used for your translation? Did you have metrics going in? Or was it a general sense that you knew what needed to be done?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 37:19
The justification for the translate for needing a translation tool, even
Colman Murphy 37:24
for the actual translation of the content and the website itself? So did you did you build out a business case upfront? Or was there a general understanding that this was what the business needed?
Nadia Anagnostopoulou 37:36
I think there was an understanding already, that translation was very important for a company, especially in the travel technology space. So that was already in place. I thankfully didn't have to make a business case. I was hired to execute what the business needed basically.
Colman Murphy 37:57
Great. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for attending. Thank you to our awesome panelists, Mike, I'm sorry, you are having some difficulty but you managed to jump in at the end. If anybody wants to reach out to any of our speakers, you can do so using their email addresses here. Also, as I said, we're going to have this recording it will be posted on our website within the next 48 hours, along with a q&a transcript and the slides. And please don't hesitate to reach out to SmartCAT if you have any other questions or needs. So with that, I am going to bring this to a close. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks, everyone.
