Multilingual SEO can go wrong in translation!
Mother tongue will ensure your website copy is culturally relevant
Imagine you are a UK typesetting company and want to offer foreign language typesetting as well. You may have clients for this service all over the world as it is quite specialized so you will probably want the website translated.
Let’s say you want the website in French so you can sell your services to French companies.
You will have probably discovered when you optimized your English site that the keywords are ‘language typesetting’ and ‘international typesetting’ (note that DTP does not get many searches.) plus the list of languages which you do typesetting into.
When translated, the word ‘typesetting’ is likely to become ‘mise en page’ or possibly ‘PAO’ however when you look at the searches on both these terms, you will see that the searches are split between the terms, with PAO ranked higher. Plus, no-one in France searches for the term with either the ‘language’ or ‘international’ prefix.
Due to the way translators work, he/she is very unlikely to use both terms in translation, and will probably use the term ‘mise en page‘ as it is more technically correct, however it is the term least searched for.
Since the term ‘PAO’ has not been used, more that half the people that search for international typesetting services in France will not see this website unless it is optimized further.
A copywriter living in France will quickly spot this error and make sure that both terms appear in the copy by rewriting sections and thereby ensuring the search engines pick up all of the terms in context (and culturally relevant in France).
By using Mother Tongue’s network of international copywriters to translate your copy you will ensure that your foreign language communication is culturally relevant to the targeted territory.