For marketing translations in the process of expanding your business abroad, resorting to mere automatic translation is not enough.
Succeeding abroad requires a lot of preparation and concentration. Marketing strategies must be defined well in advance and planned in great detail. What generally keeps the mind busy is defining the method of entry and presence in foreign territory.
The modern society in which we live does not accept excuses: the website must be an element of support for the user experience even abroad. It is a business card, a tool for Italian companies that want to get closer to potential foreign customers and the reference market. For this reason, for an internationalization or expansion strategy of your business in a specific market – even during or following participation in international fairs – it is recommended to provide a professional translation of the website in advance.
We do not limit ourselves to considering only the process of translating the contents of the site into European languages, more or less known to us, but certainly familiar.
How Chinese website translation works
Let’s imagine what could happen in the translation from Italian to a Sino-Tibetan language, such as Chinese. Although Chinese is in the top 10 of the most spoken languages in the world, we must recognize that its knowledge is still rather limited in European countries – even considering the important demographic segment that speaks Chinese as a mother tongue. Therefore in this case, requesting the intervention of Chinese translators for marketing translations is essential.
Experts who translate a website rely on their knowledge of the language, linguistic and idiomatic nuances, and the socio-cultural factors of the target audience. If the target market is the Chinese one, then the team of expert translators of the Chinese language and culture will be able to tell you which information, which products, which words, which colors could work best and satisfy the requests and expectations of the target audience.
Likewise, a marketing strategy involves under marketing translations not only website translation, but also SEO translations to optimize traffic in the target market/country and translations for ADS campaigns.
Search engine analysis for your business abroad: between Baidu and Google
It will be interesting to know that the well-known search engine Google is not the one and only search engine used in the world. If it is true that the Google engine holds a monopoly in America and in much of the European continent, on the other hand it shares its share of popularity with other famous search engines. The worldwide usage ranking sees Google (92.18%) in first place, followed by Bing (2.27%), Yahoo (1.5%), Baidu (1.45%), Yandex (0.68 %), and the remainder from others.
While Yandex is the most used search engine (55%) in Russia, Baidu covers 74.73% of the market in China – compared to Google’s 2%.
The Internet company Baidu was founded in Beijing in 2000, created by Robin Li. Due to language and political barriers, Baidu has virtually zero traffic outside of China. Google, on the other hand, is unable to achieve much success in China due to a series of rather strict regulations and censorship.
To optimize your site’s search on Baidu, from a more technical aspect, Baidu works pretty much like all other search engines. While from a more strategic point of view, the contents of the site pages must be in line with the rules imposed by the search engine itself. Indexing a page on Baidu could therefore take longer, due to scrupulous and repeated checks.
Baidu gives a lot of importance to keywords, title tags and metadata to evaluate the optimization of web pages, while Google takes other elements into account for ranking. Or again, the Javascript language should be avoided for sites to be indexed on Baidu – even if this means partially giving up the dynamic factor of the site.
Some points need to be taken into greater consideration. First of all, Baidu is a program born in China for China, and therefore focused on a more local market – unlike Google, which has a more global vision. Pages with content deemed suitable and in Chinese are mainly rewarded and made visible to users.
Secondly, companies are increasingly becoming mobile-friendly promoters, in response to the needs and habits of the Chinese public. For this reason, optimizing your website in mobile mode in China is essential to climbing the SERP.
Lastly, investing in sponsorships is a very effective action to gain visibility and increase brand identity. The Chinese believe that if a company can afford to invest in advertising on Baidu, then it is much more reliable than companies that do not invest in sponsored ones.
These and many other small measures can be lifesavers for your business abroad. The Asian market, like the Russian or Arab one, is very particular, starting first of all from the language. This is why relying on Chinese translators is a necessary step so that you can turn the strategic plan into an action plan.
LingoYou Press Office
