How To Choose and Manage a Multilingual CMS for Your Business
Content localization and a multilingual website are crucial bricks in the structure of any business serving a multinational market. Europe is an obvious example: the largest single market in the world, spread across countries with 24 official languages. Companies based in Europe can easily offer their services abroad, but with over 70% of internet users preferring content in their native tongue, taking full advantage of the single market means localizing your website and product.
Localization is a major task for marketing teams. Problems include:
- Storing and managing multiple translations in one place, along with the original text
- Being sure that different alphabets and characters will function
- Providing access to translators and editors, or integrating with a third-party service via API
- Keeping translations up to date with new and edited content
A good content management system (CMS) helps to organize information so everyone involved, from leadership and marketing to copywriters, translators, and programmers, can take their task in hand and get the right information, in the right language, to the right audience.
TYPO3 CMS offers advanced multilingual functions that make it simple to localize your website – and keep it up to date! Find out more about TYPO3.
The world is multilingual – your website should be, too
The world is still far from having one language, however dominant English has come to be. Fluent English speakers remain a tiny minority, and building a truly global business in the twenty-first century requires many languages.
Offering the same content in multiple languages means that users can comfortably navigate sites and more quickly find the information and products they need. This is to say nothing of the SEO benefit you gain from targeting keywords in multiple languages for local markets. The smaller the language pool, the easier it is to get a higher ranking for your site.
But running a website in several languages can be a daunting task with an ineffective CMS. It could mean your good brand-building and outlay get scattered ineffectively over lines of expensive code and translation. Moreover, as you look to the future, your translation and maintenance workflows need to scale in a user-friendly way (potentially up to hundreds of languages!).
Luckily, the right multilingual CMS can make creating and maintaining such a website much easier. Let’s look at some features that a good multilingual CMS will provide (and that will make your workday easier).
Manage all translations in one place
Multiple installations and interfaces are time-consuming and expensive—especially when you’re maintaining multiple language variants. Ideally, you want all of your languages in one place, for centralized management — but also for comparing and proofreading translations.
Some CMSs offer basic multilingual options, but languages with different character sets and writing directions can be difficult or impossible to handle alongside English text. TYPO3 not only supports non-Latin character sets—Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.—you can also mix writing directions, for example, to quote Hebrew content (right-to-left) within English content (left-to-right).
TYPO3 provides a central translation interface to display translations in parallel for easy overview and comparison during editing while accommodating any number of languages, character sets, and writing directions within a single installation. And there’s no need to install third-party language support!
Simplify sourcing and adding translations
So, you’ve got a content management platform, but where will your translations come from?
Machine translation is cheap and fast, but not always reliable without a human proofreader. Human translation is costly and slow, but offers higher quality and is more likely to match searches in local markets and resonate with different customer bases thanks to translators’ native knowledge.
A good multilingual CMS like TYPO3 will give you easy access to whichever option you choose, letting you source your translations directly into the CMS, rather than copying and pasting from files sent by email:
- Integration with machine translation by API
- Integration via API with human translation services
- Translators and proofreaders can work directly within the CMS
TYPO3 makes sure that your site is kept safe during the translation process. Its fine-grained user access helps translators and authors get their job done while preventing them from changing configurations, causing accidental deletions, additions, or errors. Thanks to the granular access right management, navigation through the backend can be made really simple for translators – only displaying the modules they need without overwhelming them with multiple functions they don't need.
Keep up-to-date with new content or edits
How soon will translators know when there is new material to translate? What about when edits are made to existing material? Your CMS should streamline this aspect of your multilingual workflow, too.
TYPO3 automatically tracks changes and can notify translators about new content and edits as soon as they load. TYPO3 also always displays the content for the default language so you can always see the original material for reference.
Building blocks of a great global brand
Brick by brick, the right CMS can help you run a multilingual global website. With the necessary tools at your disposal, you can manage several websites and languages through a single login.
With open-source contributors, service providers, and end-users all over the world, TYPO3 is as global as you are. We understand the needs of a company with a diverse customer base and a global, multilingual team. Our multisite functionality also helps marketing and design teams maintain the balance between brand consistency and local control across multiple websites.
TYPO3’s CMS provides everything you need to turn the world’s abundance of languages and localities to your advantage and build to the sky.
If you’re ready to get started using TYPO3 to enhance your business, there are a number of Official TYPO3 Partner agencies ready to work with you in achieving your goal.
Official Partner agencies deliver high quality web support, ranging from installation, to extension setup, consulting, and long-term support. Find the right partner for your business.
