Website Localisation

Your website is the best international marketing tool you could ever wish for. Having a Russian version of your website means being ahead of your competition and attracting millions of potential new customers.

Bearing in mind that 99% of Russian will search the internet in their own language; if you don't use website localisation then your potential Russian audience will click elsewhere. They either cannot understand English or do not want to read in English at that time. Either way, they have gone and probably won't come back.

There is no reason for shrinking away from localization to Russian on grounds of expense. You can translate part of your site, say a few pages at a time, and increase the marketing efforts where you feel most confident. You can keep the price to a minimum and study the results in your sales. The bottom line here is that you can sell in any language you want, but people tend to buy in their own language.

If you cant excite the people about your product, if you can't get them to trust you, you will not be making any sales. This means you need to adapt your communication strategy. The sales letter that works at home might not bring any sales in a Russian market.

With our help you can turn your website into a dynamic and effective marketing channel. Whatever material you wish to put on your website we can translate and localise it for you.

What happens in Website Localisation?

Unlike simple translation of site text from English into Russian, website localisation is a way of integrating the whole of the site cohesively into the culture of your Russian target market. Every website localisation process is different and even Russian business etiquette has to be taken into account.

Our team of professional Russian translators, localisation engineers and DTP publishers work together to ensure the highest quality of the final product.

Usually the website localisation process consists of the following steps:

1) Review of English web and marketing material
2) Translation, cultural adaptation and editing
3) Inserting of the translated text in HTML codes and localizing graphics
4) Final proofreading of the Russian website

These are only guiding steps of the process. Professional translators may work directly on the native web formats in environments equipped with relevant spell checking, translation memories and glossaries.

Alternatively, our translators work on the text content while our website localisation engineers work on the graphics, HTML etc. It may be necessary to make some changes in the coding to make the site readable for different Russian (Cyrillic) browsers.

We work at solving other technological problems. It may be necessary to translate your scripts, graphic texts etc, and once the translation is finished it will be necessary to adjust your site for Russian cultural and linguistic differences. It is only possible to do this in close cooperation with our you the client.

Isn't it enough just to translate the content?

Simply translating English text will not work, as experience has shown that some images, which are innocuous in an English context, might be meaningless, embarrassing or even offensive in Russian culture.

Even for simpler sites, translation is not limited to only texts. Some HTML elements like the titles, keywords, descriptions and alt tags need to be translated to ensure correct use and search engine indexing. We handle the translating of all images that contain text and, if necessary, web applications which interact with your visitors.

To see a simple example of a website localisation project, take a look at the Russian pages of the DHL web site, which we helped to localise in 2005.

Once you have your website in the language of your choice, you have taken a major step forward in your Russian internet marketing process. Hopefully, after all that hard work and effort, you will be rewarded by receiving lots of enquiries about your products or services.

Our aim is to assist you in achieving your aims; we do far more than just translate words. Please contact us to discuss your website localisation needs in greater detail.