Both human and machine translation have a place in our work, and each can be used when taking marketing content global.

Let's take a look at three types of translation techniques, their definitions, and what content they are most appropriate for:

1. Human translation

2. Pure machine translation

3. Machine translation with human editing

1. Human Translation

Definition

A professional linguist (most often, an in-country native speaker) reviews your project and, using guidelines agreed on beforehand, translates it to the language you require. The goal is to speak to your audience in the most natural, effective way. You can expect human translations to be free of idiomatic errors and to flow naturally and fluently.

Advertising and marketing projects can be "transcreated," which means using your headlines, copy, scripts, and product names as the starting point. Your material is then creatively translated into culturally sensitive language that will appeal and make sense to your global audience.

Best candidates: Projects that need to convince, persuade, build trust, inspire, educate, entertain, or sell your product. For example:

• Print and broadcast advertising

• Marketing and branding materials

• Store signage

• Social media

• Product and brand names

• Website content

• Multimedia (e.g., Flash, voiceovers, etc.)

2. Pure Machine Translation

Definition

Pure machine translation is a computer-generated attempt to reproduce the language reasoning that human brains perform. Because translation is all about interpretation of meaning, our brains perform loads of cultural assessment, analyzing nuances and expression to fully comprehend language. Our brains are able to assess these nuances and translate them. Machines have not yet been able to do that, even with the simplest types of text.

Rules-based machine translation dates back to the Cold War, but today there's a new way of approaching machine translation called "statistic-based translation."

To perform statistic-based translation, a search engine delves into the billions of words and word pairings on the Web and produces statistically good matches for the way things have been said in one language with the way they've been said in another. And tools are available that apply some grammar rules to the translated material, producing some fairly decent results.

However, you'll still find thousands of often-hilarious examples of the pitfalls and limitations of machine translation on restaurant menus and store signs—and sometimes, in important business communications—around the world.

Best candidate: Personal use. Here are some examples:

• Looking up a word or phrase and translating it into your native language, or vice versa

• Travel aid—translating restaurant menus, directional signage, maps, and more

• Just for fun—tweets, Facebook updates, quick notes to friends or family

• Getting the general sense of a short piece of text when exact details are not important

3. Machine Translation With Human Pre- and Post-Editing

Definition

This hybrid is akin to a cyborg: It's a more serious, controlled machine-translation software used by professionals with lots of up-front prep work.

Here's how it works. A linguist goes through the project first, then "trains" the machine-translation engine to translate properly. For example, the linguist will feed long lists of words with double meanings into the software, essentially tweaking the software's rules to tailor the localization to a specific project or client.

After the material is sent through the software, the linguist will look through the first few thousand words to check for mistakes and, if necessary, will retrain the software to interpret rules correctly. The material will go through again and will be reviewed by post-translation editors who make minimal changes to ensure that the material is technically accurate and understandable to readers.

Those translations will definitely not be at the level of fluency of human translation. But if you don't have the budget to localize those 10,000 data sheets, human-aided machine translation could be a great solution for you.

Best candidates: Large-volume projects of more than 500,000 words

• Projects that require a very large volume of words to be translated and therefore justify the considerable setup time

• Straightforward text

• Technical manuals and data sheets

• Safety instructions or documents that must be posted by law (or anything that needs to be accurate, but where style isn't the first priority)

• Customer reviews on your website

• Large internal documents that are not consumer-facing

When making decisions about which localization method to go with, give careful consideration to the type, size, and audience of your project; and, of course, keep your customers in mind, too.

One thing is for sure: There isn't a machine on earth that can help you make those very human decisions.

Not so long ago, there were only a few companies out there that bothered to customize their websites for foreign markets. Those who chose to do so made minimal effort—they simply translated their English copy into the local language and started doing business. Their incentives to create more sophisticated, tailored offerings was minimal; with so few companies doing it, there was no competition for e-business or Google rankings. This, however, is no longer the case.

In the past, only the big players could afford to invest the time and strategic resources needed to localize their websites, and even they didn’t always invest enough to do it well. But today, more and more retail companies are harnessing the power of the internet to globalize their businesses and tap revenue streams from across the world. From Blue Nile to Yves Saint Laurent, retailers are taking steps to reach consumers in a wide array of languages. The stakes have changed since the early days of e-business. In this age of global business, engaging only one nation’s consumer base is a sure way to plateau your company’s revenue and growth.

As companies look outside the U.S. for more business, many struggle to manage the challenges and harness the opportunities of multilingual search engine optimization (MSEO). They understand that customizing their websites to suit the linguistic needs of each national market can result in significantly increased web traffic, as well as increased revenue per order and improved international brand recognition. They just don’t know how or where to begin.

Other organizations are a few steps ahead, having waded into the waters of MSEO. Unfortunately, many of them are ill-equipped. In their efforts to do something, they often follow flawed strategies by simply translating their English keywords, rather than performing a complete review of objectives and opportunities for each target market. As most who have done any SEO work know, just because a particular word relates to one’s product, it doesn’t mean that the majority of searches for it apply.

Better translation choices, better MSEO

Simply put, to be successful, companies need to use the information gathered during a source language SEO campaign and adapt that to work in global markets. As competition and international revenue grows, companies must take their efforts to the next level with website localization and optimization. Whether a business already offers its website in multiple languages or is simply in the planning stages, it is vital to understand how investing in MSEO can result in greater online visibility in the short term and faster return on investment (ROI) in the long term.

There are several issues to keep in mind, regardless of whether your company has launched international websites or is planning to do so.

You say “copy optimization,” I say “proper keyword selection.” However you put it, the words on your website serve as a virtual shop sign for potential customers and visitors. And just as a restaurateur wouldn’t hang an antique store sign over his front door, businesses operating in foreign markets must choose the words that best convey who they are, what they do and why customers should care. Therefore, copy optimization and proper keyword selection is the first item that should be on the minds of companies moving into foreign markets. It is essential to validate keyword choices before going live in other languages.

The right words, for the right markets, at the right times. There’s a reason why the literati applaud when a new, improved translation of a great foreign novel is released. The work of maintaining the nuance, connotation and mood of the original language takes knowledge and skill. Machines cannot accomplish it, and when companies rely on machine translation, their shortcuts become obvious. Organizations that deploy such solutions are almost putting themselves at a greater disadvantage than those that don’t translate at all. For example, “refreshing” might sound like a great keyword for a drink in English, but in another language, the direct translation might connote something quite negative, like “pond water.” Machine translation is not adept at catching these kinds of subtleties, which can make or break a campaign.

Visitors know what language they prefer. Let them choose it for themselves. Just as a company should avoid auto-translations, automatic redirects to particular language sites may also put you at a disadvantage. For most situations, it is a good idea to choose a dropdown language menu instead. With automatic redirects, customers have the website language chosen for them, which can cause frustration and decrease your site’s effectiveness. For instance, just because someone lives in Quebec doesn’t mean they prefer French over English. The same is true throughout the United States, where many non-native English speakers might appreciate the option of selecting content in alternate languages.

SEO now, SEO forever. Building multilingual websites is not a task to be done in staggered attempts; there is little value, for example, in going live with a website that is not optimized for SEO. Some companies are tempted to start by translating their websites and optimizing them later to phase in resource investments. However, this phased approach actually costs more money in the long-term. MSEO is not a strategy one should employ after the fact. Rather, it should guide content development and site-architecture strategy. Otherwise, you’re building a website based solely on what looks good, rather than what conveys the most accurate information. Only when SEO and design are done in conjunction can a company clearly answer the question: “Have we launched a website that will attract customers?”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, you better make sure that image gets translated, too. When companies consider the steps to take in localizing their websites, they often overlook images. This can be a mistake with severe consequences. For example, the financial services firm that peppers its site with pictures of impressive buildings around the world might run into a problem it does not recognize or understand when one of its random photo selections carries a local association with waste, corruption or failure.

The payoffs for globalizing and localizing e-business are great. To reap those rewards, though, organizations must put in appropriate effort on the front end of their website projects. This demonstration of authentic interest in local markets is directly related to increases in revenue and sales figures, which don’t need to be translated to be clearly understood by any business.

What is Multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is about knowing where your potential clients are most likely to be searching, what they are searching for and what they are expecting to see on your site. Multilingual SEO allows you to communicate to these potential clients using their local search engines. If carried out properly, Multilingual SEO has all the potential to unlock new markets creating new customers all over the world for your products and services.

How can Multilingual SEO help you achieve success?

Multilingual SEO is not just confined to preparing your website for a multilingual search engine submission and translating your web pages into certain languages or Meta tags. Keep in mind that one must adhere to the technical upshots and algorithms of different languages. Each language has its own algorithms that require careful attention and more often than not, you will be needing a Multilingual SEO company that can provide you an effective platform that will let you communicate with your target audience.

Multilingual SEO is about communicating with people around the world in their mother tongue. Come to think of it, many countries around the world are still not that acquainted with the English language so it is your own initiative to sell them your products and services by adjusting to their capabilities.

If you want your business to be closer to global markets, then Multilingual SEO is definitely the right way to do it. Newer markets and a lot of rewarding opportunities will surely come your way if this type of SEO strategy is pushed through.ultilingual SEO

You know what you sell and you know the topic of your website. Are you sure that Google puts your website in the right category? If your website is about shoes, Google still might think that it is about frogs and toads.

If Google puts your website in the wrong category, it will be very difficult to get high rankings for your keywords.

How to find out what Google thinks about your website

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a "similar" search for your domain. Enter the following in Google's search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site.

If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won't display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Why does Google put your website in the wrong category?

Suppose your website is about selling shoes. If your site is linked by other websites that link to your website and other websites that are about frogs and toads then Google might think that your website is related to frogs and toads.

It's important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you're listed in the "Shoes" category of an Internet directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes.

When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes. That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Is your website in the right co-citation category?

The other websites to which your link partners link influence the ranking of your website on Google.

Here's an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don't link to each other, Google thinks that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other.

If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If you are the owner of website A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

What does this mean for your website?

When you build links, make sure that the page that links to your site also contains other links that are related to your website topic. The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better.

If the link to your website is in a good neighborhood then it will be much easier to get high rankings for your keywords.

I can provide you backlink tools that will help you to get more related backlinks to your website. Related backlinks and optimized web page content will bring your website on Google's first result page.