Client Has Asked Me To Translate Website Into Other Languages- Don't Know How

Thanks Randall.

I would like to give it a go, but not sure where to start. I outsource all my jobs on Upwork and have a team of guys in Pakistan that do the work. They are great at creating visuals but absolutely useless at anything technical or that requires attention to detail. I guess you get what you pay for. I was just wondering if there were any short cuts such as maybe install a widget that translates and then get a translator to proof read?

Or would i need to hire a french web designer to do the french version, german web designer to do a german version? There has to be an easier way?

Far as I can tell as a user, no -- you can't edit how Google translates, nor any of the other mechanical (bot) translators.

If you really want to see what happens, try going:

Native language >>> Second language >>> Back to native language.

Whether you hire translators or developers is up to you, but a human who understands context and culture will yield the best results for things like sales pages.

Why not just ask the client how important these separate sites are so you can get a sense of budget?? Google translate can make some errors. I wouldn't want my company's whole site in a language based on Google translate if I were making good money from those customers.

I would under no circumstances do that!

Sorry, i am doing a lot of translation jobs from english into german (since i am a german), and some send me a translation from google to proofread. When they do that, i tell them, that i can't proofread it, since german is a hard language, and google isn't really doing a good job at all in it. Even as a native german, i can't understand, what google spit out there, and have to ask than for the original english version, because than i can make any sense out of it.
I have made also translations for websites directly in the source code, but it is a lot of work. Just to give you a heads up from the translation standpoint.

Best regards

AkteX1

Wouldn't that solve this:

Brent

As John McCabe said, you don't need anyone with web design skills. You need someone with language skills.

Automated translation (i.e. WPML or Google Translate) won't do a professional job. I speak English, German, and Spanish and can tell you that language translation is NOT word for word. In all 3 of these languages, word translation is only part of the task. There are significant differences in sentence structure and understanding the original text is important when it comes to determining when to apply the appropriate "formal" vs. "familiar" word translation.

To insure the best translation, get a different translator for each target language and supply each of them with the original (English?) text as their starting point.

Once you have a decent translation in each language, you will probably need a coder (as suggested by Mike Anthony) to set the site up to recognize the desired language (i.e. via IP address or user selection) and render either the original (untranslated content) as the default, or the appropriate translation in the desired language.

I like Janice's solution, too...

and with just a very little code you can set/check a cookie so that the language only has to be set when the first page is viewed by a visitor.

It really doesn't take that much more space on the server, and it requires much less coding expertise than my more complex solution.