How to translate your websites correctly

Before I answer the question how to translate your websites correctly, may be we should first discuss IF you should translate your websites and WHY.
Before hiring a professional translator you should first figure out if you will get a return on invest out of your investment.

I suggest that you do the following:

STEP ONE: Check the browser language

By checking the browser language that your end-users use to surf the web you can already figure out their preferred language to communicate.

To make things clearer, here an example:

Top10 Browser Languages of webmaster XYZ:

en
English
185,192
54.96%

zh
Chinese
45,226
13.42%

es
Spanish
35,396
10.50%

de
German
19,983
5.93%

fr
French
11,073
3.29%

tr
Turkish
5,491
1.63%

nl
Dutch
5,440
1.61%

sv
Swedish
3,471
1.03%

pl
Polish
2,871
0.85%

it
Italian
2,801
0.83%

Okay, so we see that the majority of your end-users are English speaking. No surprise? No. But we can also see that 13.42% of your end-users prefer to surf the web in Chinese; 10.50% prefer to surf the web in Spanish and 5.93% in German.

Does that mean that you should immediately translate all our websites into Chinese, Spanish and German? NOOO!!!
Why not? This brings us to a very important topic for the decision making process before ordering your translations: Billing. Now you are asking yourself what billing has to do with the translation of your websites? The answer is: A lot!
13.42% of your end-users come from China. That is good. Can you actually bill them for watching your content? If the answer is "No" - that is bad.

Another example:
You might have a lot of end-users with "es-mx" (Mexican Spanish) browser language. Does that automatically mean that you have a lot of Mexican traffic? May be. But it could also be Mexicans living in the United States of America. So when it comes to browser language they are Mexican traffic, which is correct. But once you want to bill them you will notice that they are turning into "U.S. traffic"!!
This leads us to step two.

STEP TWO: Make sure that you can actually bill them
As we have just seen, it is not only important to know what language your end-user prefer to surf the web in, but also that you can actually bill them.

That is why it is very important to also check the IP address of your end-users. Like that you can decide if your traffic comes from a country where you can actually bill them.

Let's take the example of your "zh" (Chinese) speaking traffic again:
If you find out through IP detection that your Chinese traffic is actually coming from China, you might NOT want to translate your sites into Chinese, as you might not be able to convert the traffic into cash. But if you find out that your "zh" speaking traffic are Chinese living in the U.S. and Canada, it could be a great idea to translate your sites, because then you can actually bill them.

STEP THREE: Check the languages of your billing company
Okay, back to the Chinese example: You have lots of "Chinese" traffic from the U.S. and Canada, you have translated all your sites into Chinese, you know that you can technically bill them ... and then you send your Chinese high-quality traffic to your credit card processor ... who only offers his join page in English. See your conversion drop like a rock in the very last minute!
This is a very common mistake that a lot of webmasters make: They translate their complete sites including their membersareas and then send their high-quality traffic to a processor that only offers his join-pages in English.
Like that a lot of webmasters manage to destroy their international traffic conversion (and their INCOME) in the very last moment.
VERY IMPORTANT: Only work with billing companies that offer their join pages in all major languages - otherwise you will lose a lot of potential income.

Resume:
Before asking a translator to translate your sites into the standard languages (Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese), you should rather first check if YOU actually have traffic from those countries and if YOU can actually bill end-users from those countries. You see - to decide into which languages you want to translate your websites is a very personal decision. Just because your neighbour has translated his sites into Japanese and is now driving a red European sports car, does not mean you should do the same - unless you have exactly the same type of traffic.

If you have any questions about how to enter the international market place, available billing solutions in the different markets worldwide or about translations, please feel free to post them here and/or to contact us at porn-translations.com, and we will do our best to help you with your quations and decision. Because we know that we only make money, if our translations pay for themselves.

Thanks a lot for your attention.

Best Regards,
Mike Miller