Why a Widgeted Approach to Website Globalization is the Best Way to Boost Your Message to the World

Your website is your business’s portal to the planet, right? Well, that depends. Can visitors access your content in their native language? If not, then you’re not really targeting the world, just one small portion of it.

That’s why website globalization is essential. You want to make it as seamless as possible for international visitors to use your website. But simultaneously, you don’t want your globalization efforts to damage your website’s performance.

In the past, offering your website in multiple languages meant predicting which ones people would want. Then you’d have your web copy translated and a separate version of your website built for each one. This was inefficient for design and storage purposes, and because switching languages meant downloading the site again.

And what about users that wanted to view your website in a language you didn’t support? They had to learn a second language quickly, or they were out of luck.

There’s a better way.

Instead of creating multiple, localized versions of your website, you can take a widgeted approach, which uses custom JavaScript code to intelligently translate your website, on the fly, into your reader’s preferred language.

This approach doesn’t slow performance, allows you to only translate what’s necessary, and provides a broader range of target languages. Instead of having five versions of your website in five different languages, you can reach a truly global audience.

How a Widgeted Approach to Website Globalization Works

Imagine someone in the Netherlands visits your website and discovers it’s in English. Many Dutch speak English, but this one is a bit shaky and would prefer to read your site in their native tongue.

Their translation request is handled by a bit of JavaScript added to your website. This code is the widget. It’s a tiny file that adds virtually nothing to your website’s load time. With this widget, paired with a translation package from SYSTRAN, you can begin allowing for global reach in just minutes. 

And it’s intelligent enough to know what should be translated and what shouldn’t. It avoids other critical JavaScript files that might break if translated, as well as names and other industry jargon that don’t translate accurately. It determines what should be rendered in Dutch and what should remain in English, and then it forwards the data to a remote translation server.

This unique interplay between your server, your visitor’s browser, and SYSTRAN’s translation server is why performance isn’t impacted when a translation occurs. Running the translation or forwarding additional files won’t burden your server. And your visitor won’t need any additional browser functionality. For them, the process is seamless. They get a fast-loading version of your website that they can confidently understand.

The Benefits of Widgeted Globalization

Beyond the performance gains over the old method for globalizing your website, you get intelligent, efficient translations. This is particularly exciting if you have a large website that features a lot of varied content. Instead of utilizing a brute force approach that simply translates everything, you can customize your translations to better cater to your content.

SYSTRAN’s translation server is multi-threaded, which means it can handle multiple translation requests from your web pages simultaneously. Even large web pages will translate quickly because concurrent requests will process at the same time.

You’ll also extend your site’s reach beyond the confines of a handful of preselected languages. SYSTRAN currently supports over 50 different tongues. Let’s say you’re moving into a new market. In the past, you’d need to design a whole new version of your website in the local language. Now the new translation is automatic, rendered on the fly. No matter where you do business, you can make your website accessible quickly, without any additional work.

If you’re a local hardware store that knows all of your customers by their first names, you probably don’t need to worry about reaching a global audience. But if you do business on an international scale with any frequency, you owe it to yourself and your readers to take a widgeted approach to website globalization. And SYSTRAN, a leader in AI-driven computer translation services, is the company you should trust to implement the solution.