ive outgrown english only and im looking at localising the site for a non english market thats sending me decent traffic. im nervous about doing it half way and ending up with something that reads like a machine translated it, which i feel like would look worse than just leaving it in english. for people who have actually localised, what actually moved the needle beyond running the text through translate?
do not machine translate the pages that handle money. join, billing, support, use a native speaker for those at minimum, even if the blog and info pages stay rough for now. a messy half translated checkout kills trust faster than plain english does, people will bail the second the payment step reads wrong. get the money path right first, the rest can be ugly for a while.
localise the payment and the compliance side, not just the words. the local preferred payment method, local language terms, and a 2257 and age statement people can actually read in their language matter more than a translated about page. underwriters and users both notice when the legal pages are obviously just english run through a tool.
[quote]a messy half translated checkout kills trust faster than plain english[/quote] thats exactly my fear, my lazy plan was literally translate the whole thing in one pass and ship it. so the fix is prioritise a real native pass on checkout and support first, and let the content pages catch up after. that reframes the whole project for me, thank you.
on payments dont assume cards travel. a lot of markets run mostly on local wallets or bank transfer and barely touch international cards, so if you only offer what works at home it reads like you didnt localise at all, you just translated. research the method people in that market actually expect to see at checkout and offer it, thats often the single biggest lever.
strongly agree on local payment methods, that is the part people skip. pick the right local method, get the money pages done by a human not a tool, and roll the rest out gradually after. treat it as entering a market, not pressing a translate button, and youll land somewhere that actually converts instead of something that looks machine made.
translation is the easy part, the hard part is the payment and the support in that language. i translate the whole site nicely but then support emails come in the new language and nobody could answer them, looked very bad. plan who will reply before you open the door, not after the customers already arrive confused.
Ran into this localising a couple of listings into a second language and the lesson was that the words were the easy part. What actually mattered was that the examples, the currency, the payment logos and the little trust cues all matched the market, or the page read as foreign no matter how clean the translation was. A perfectly translated page with the wrong payment icons still feels like it wasnt made for you. Do the money pages and the trust signals properly first, and machine translate nothing a buyer has to act on.