Pogo have been working in conjunction with AICOL to transform their existing website into websites in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Portuguese and Arabic. The significant challenges presented by working in a foreign language have made for interesting times but we’ve been resourceful and creative and we’ve had the language resources of the English school at our disposal.
The bulk of the websites are getting a fully functional and translated front page only. Sub-pages are merely links to AICOL’s existing website that are linked via a Google Translate service. The pages are rendered in the required language and become part of the cache (so they’re open for Google indexing). We have relied heavily on Google translations for the websites but we have also had the aid of native speakers. A language like Japanese does not translate very well via online translation services so it will get a complete translation.
Some have asked, since the existing English website can translate and cache in foreign languages, why do we need to create translated websites? The answer is, it’s mostly for the SEO benefits of having a website hosted in that country and in that country’s language. These are important markets for AICOL and relying on a Google Translate version is not good enough. Some of these countries (such as China) do not have search engines usage dominated by Google and there are advantages to being locally hosted in the local language that make the exercise worth the effort.
We’re not finished yet but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is no doubt that working on six translations at once has been doing our heads in at times but we’ve got considerable momentum at the moment and will have the sites hosted and functioning quite soon.