Your online presence – particularly your home or landing page – often represents the very first contact with your future customers and partners, their critical first impression of you.

  • In the first 100 milliseconds, optical stimuli play a major role even before visitors perceive any content.
  • After the first 500 milliseconds, visitors perceive and evaluate the first contents. This is when layout, user guidance and content truly begin to play a role.
  • If the content does not provide the information visitors are looking for, or if the information is considered unsatisfactory or untrustworthy, visitors leave a website after 3 seconds on average.

One criterion for evaluating textual content is whether it is written correctly and clearly – and preferably in the visitors’ native language. This is not simply a sign of esteem: even for visitors with excellent foreign language skills, a high-quality translation facilitates their access to your message and its adoption.

Websites require a certain know-how

When translating texts for the web, DeFrEnT combines technical know-how with translation expertise and a good sense for concise and clear statements. In fact, this is necessary because web copy has a number of pitfalls:

As with marketing translations, a “transcreation” can be a free rendition of the meaning as long as the message gets through and achieves the desired effect (information, persuasion, call to action, …). As with software localization, there may be character limits to avoid overflowing content elements. Furthermore, websites often contain a high proportion of “hidden” text, e.g. in the “title”, “description” or “alt” attributes of links, images and media. Moreover, it is important to check whether texts primarily intended for search engine optimization (SEO title, description and keywords) might not have to be recreated independently of the source text in order to fulfil their purpose.

With multilingual websites, it therefore makes little sense to thwart previous investments in good web design and carefully written copy by economizing on translation. Even today, machine translation and people with other areas of expertise cannot be expected to deliver the professional quality you need.

Mr. Köbel is at your service as a translator to and from German and French. If required, he can imply fellow translators for other languages. When accepting web texts, DeFrEnT flexibly adapts to your preferred mode of operation:

  • CMS Editor- or Translator-level login
  • DOCX/ODT/RTF documents
  • XLSX/ODS/CSV tables with one language per column
  • INI/PO/XLIFF export files
  • XML source code or export files
  • HTML source code