Translating a website is not one task but four, and they have different owners: the copy, the technical signalling, the formats and conventions, and the publishing. Projects fail at the seams between them far more often than they fail at the translating.

The commonest shape of failure is a site whose words are correct in eleven languages and whose hreflang is missing, whose forms reject local addresses, whose buttons overflow in German and whose meta descriptions are empty. None of that is a language problem, and all of it is the language project’s responsibility to have raised.

This piece sets out the four jobs, who should own each, and the sequence that avoids the expensive version.

Key Takeaways

  • Decide ownership of the four jobs before launch, in writing. The technical items fall between
    the language supplier, the web agency and the in-house team, and therefore often fall to
    nobody.
  • Extract the content inventory from the site before anything is quoted. A page count is not a
    content inventory, and the automated messages are almost always outside the CMS.
  • Plan for text expansion in the design, not in the translation. Asking a translator to make
    German fit an English button is asking for worse German.

The four jobs

Job What it covers Natural owner Failure if unowned
Copy Transcreation of the pages that persuade; translation of the operational and
legal text		 The language supplier Correct, flat pages
Technical signalling hreflang, localised URLs, titles, meta descriptions, headings,
alt text, structured data		 Agreed explicitly — usually the web team, briefed by the
language supplier		 The wrong language served; no local search presence
Formats and conventions Dates, currencies, units, address and phone formats, name
order, text direction, text expansion		 The web team, flagged by the language supplier Forms that reject local input; broken layouts
Publishing Getting the approved content into the CMS, booking engine, app strings
or artwork		 Whoever has CMS access — ideally the language supplier Errors
introduced after approval, invisible to everyone’s QA

The second and third rows are the ones that go unowned. A language supplier that does not raise them is not doing the job properly, even if its translations are good.

We define transcreation as “creative translation”, a process that adapts the emotional expressions and contextual relevance of the source message that goes beyond literal meaning of words. Four things have to arrive together for it to work: language, emotion, culture and your brand’s tone of voice.

The sequence that works

  1. Extract the inventory. Every page, plus the content that is not pages: form labels, error messages, confirmation and transactional emails, PDF downloads, image text. The transactional messages usually live in a different system and are the most-missed items on any website project.
  2. Mark each item for treatment. Transcreate, translate, or localise. This is the document suppliers quote against.
  3. Settle terminology and register per language. Before writing, not during review.
  4. Research the target-language keywords, and give them to the writers before they start. Translated keywords are not local keywords; the reasoning is in website translation for SEO and user experience.
  5. Check the design for expansion. Some languages run substantially longer than English and some substantially shorter. This is a design constraint, not a translation constraint.
  6. Write, review in market, approve.
  7. Publish into the systems, then check in place rather than in the document.
  8. Verify the technical layer after launch, not only before it. hreflang in particular breaks silently on later releases.

What to translate and what to rewrite

A website is the clearest case for mixed treatment, because the content types sit side by side on the same page.

The pages whose job is to make someone want the thing — home, category, product or property, destination, campaign landing pages — need rewriting in each language. The operational layer — rates, policies, terms, delivery and returns, accessibility and safety information — needs rendering accurately and plainly. The interface layer — labels, buttons, form fields, error and confirmation messages — needs localising: short, conventional and within the space available.

The mistake is a single blended rate across all three, which overpays for the second and underfunds the first. The sector-specific versions are in website translation for hotels and website translation for travel brands.

Publishing, and why files are not delivery

Content approved as a document and then re-keyed by someone else acquires a new class of error that nobody checks for.

Copy-paste publishing drops diacritics, breaks character encoding, truncates fields, puts the right paragraph on the wrong page and strips formatting. These errors appear after the language supplier’s quality assurance and before anyone looks at the live page, which is the one gap in the process with no owner.

Publishing directly into the system closes it. We have delivered into Adobe Experience Manager for Frasers Hospitality, Sitecore for Resorts World Sentosa, Far East Hospitality and Millennium Hotels & Resorts, and the Drupal back end for COMO alongside the client’s own digital agency.

How the work runs

A supplier that can name its steps can tell you which one you are in. Ours runs in six:

  1. Understand the Project Brief. The content, the markets, the purpose and the constraints.
  2. Pre-Transcreation Study. Reviewing brand materials, style and tone, and uncovering the market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms the content will need.
  3. Transcreation. The writing, drawing on the Translation Memory built for your brand.
  4. Client Review. Your own market teams read the content before it is live.
  5. Update and Approval. Revisions, then sign-off.
  6. Final Delivery. Into the system it has to live in, or as artwork ready to print.

What we can evidence

Website programmes, by language count and the system the content was published into.

  • For Frasers Hospitality we relaunched the website in 15 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and German — over half a million words in eight weeks, integrated into the client’s Adobe Experience Manager system, alongside CRM content, sales brochures and fact sheets.
  • For COMO Hotels & Resorts we localised website content into 7 languages — Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian and Spanish — publishing into the Drupal back end alongside the client’s digital agency, and extended the programme to CRM content, in-room directories, spa and F&B menus and press releases.
  • For Far East Hospitality we are an appointed language service provider, handling Sitecore websites and CRM content — in-room directories, sales brochures and fact sheets — in Simplified Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia and Japanese for the China, Indonesia and Japan markets.
  • For Millennium Hotels & Resorts we are an appointed language service provider, producing brand content for China, Taiwan, Japan, the UAE, Spain, Italy and France on Sitecore, with quality assurance before go-live.
  • For Resorts World Sentosa we are the appointed language service provider to the Digital and Regional Marketing teams, covering Sitecore websites, leaflets, in-market brochures, display ads and eDMs in Chinese, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, Tamil, Vietnamese, Thai and more, with a Translation Memory maintained per language.
  • For FWD, the Omne app was localised into 7 Asian languages — Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Japanese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia — integrated into the app’s content management system and checked linguistically so that every market could launch simultaneously across APAC.

We do not publish traffic or conversion outcomes for client sites, because the ones that circulate in this category are generally unsourced and the attribution is rarely honest. Scope, language count, turnaround and delivery are checkable, so those are what we state.

The cost argument is about the programme, not the first invoice. A Translation Memory dedicated to your brand records how your content has been handled in each language, so repeat and updated material draws on work already paid for. Transcreated copy that is right first time avoids the redo cycle that literal translation sets off. And one partner across every touchpoint and market removes the coordination overhead of several suppliers, each interpreting your tone differently. Our clients cite those Translation Memory savings as one of the reasons they stay.

At IPPWORLD, we are an award-winning transcreation agency that specialises in creative translation and marketing localisation for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and retail sectors. The award is Best Hospitality Creative Translation & Localisation Agency 2019, at the LUXlife Hospitality Awards. We have worked in this field since 1994, from Singapore, with an editorial team in Shanghai, and we work in 30 languages — 18 Asian, 10 European and 2 Middle Eastern.

Conclusion

A multilingual website is a coordination problem with a writing problem inside it. Extract the inventory before quoting, assign the four jobs explicitly, settle terminology and keywords before writing, design for expansion, and publish into the system rather than handing over files.

Done in that order, the language work is the hard part and everything else is mechanical. Done out of order, the language work is fine and the website still does not perform, and it takes months to work out why.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does website translation actually involve?
Four jobs: the copy, split between rewriting the pages that persuade and rendering the operational text; the technical signalling, including hreflang, localised URLs, titles and meta descriptions; the formats and conventions, from dates and currencies to address fields and text expansion; and the publishing into the live system.
Who owns hreflang and the technical SEO items?
Whoever you assign them to in writing before launch. Unassigned, they fall between the language supplier, the web agency and the in-house team and get done by nobody. They also need checking after each later release, because hreflang breaks silently.
What gets missed most often on a website translation project?
The content that is not pages: form labels, error messages, confirmation and transactional emails, PDF downloads and text inside images. The transactional messages usually live in a different system from the CMS, which is why they are omitted from the page count the project was quoted on.
How do you handle text that gets longer in translation?
In the design, not in the translation. Some languages run substantially longer than English and some shorter, so components need to tolerate it. Asking a writer to compress their language into an English button produces worse copy, not a better layout.
Should the language supplier publish into our CMS?
It closes a real gap if they can. Content approved as a document and re-keyed by someone else acquires errors — dropped diacritics, broken encoding, truncated fields — after the supplier’s checks and before anyone reads the live page. Publishing directly means the content can be checked in place.
Can we translate the site and optimise it later?
You can, and it costs more than doing it together. Keywords inserted into finished translated text read awkwardly, because the sentences were not built around them; and retrofitting the technical layer usually means re-opening pages across every language.

Send us your site inventory, systems list and market list and we will mark up the four jobs and who should own each. More on the service is on our website localisation page and the category on marketing translation. Related reading: website translation for SEO and user experience, website translation for hotels, website translation for travel brands and what localisation means.