Before you are ready to get started with our Translation API, your content needs to be ready for the translation process. We will help you decide which things you should consider and which steps you should take while preparing your content for translation.

1. Assess your goals

Consider what you want to achieve and which audience you want to reach by translating your content. Which content is relevant for your foreign audience, and which content is not? Do you need to translate all of your content, or only a selection? In addition, you should consider the quality level you will need for your translations to fit these purposes.

2. Choose your target languages

Now that you have established your target audience, your content, and your desired quality level, you are able to proceed to the selection of the target language(s). We would advise you to take the following factors into account:

• Which country/countries are you going to target?
• Which main languages are spoken in your target country/countries? Most countries have a multilingual population, and it might be important to translate to more than one language even if you are are targeting just one country.
• Which locale(s) are relevant for your target audience? This is not only relevant for the translation itself (e.g. UK or US English), but also for times, currencies etcetera.

3. Select and prepare your content

When you have evaluated your goals and your target audience(s), it is time to select your content and prepare it for ​translation! Preparing your content consists of adding a style guide and/or glossary and sizing your orders.

Style guide

To make sure that the translation meets your goals, it is important to provide the translator with relevant information about your text, targets and preferences. Relevant information consists for example of: target audience, the style and tone of your copy writing, formality, the purpose of your text and your personal preferences. You can find more information in the Style guide section.

Glossary

With the Glossary, you are able to predefine translations for specific words. Translators will see the glossary during the translation process. When your content contains very specific terminology, it is important to specify these concepts. You may already have translated before: we can help you select the terminology you were satisfied with, so your previous translations will be consistent with your future translations. If you have very specific marketing strategies, the effectiveness of your translations is greatly enhanced when you combine the Style Guide and the glossary. Don't hesitate to contact us for advice!

Order size

The size of your order impacts the quality of the translation and the speed with which your content is being translated.

Therefore, we would like to advise you to take a few things into consideration. Firstly, make sure your request contains texts that are contextually related. The translators will be able to deliver better quality when they can focus on one type of text at the same time. We advise against sending single sentences, seeing as meaning and grammar are defined by the context of other sentences. In many cases, it will be very difficult to deliver a good end result.

A few examples of sizing your orders:

• When running an e-commerce application, consider grouping the requests per item or per category.
• You may consider separating UI copywriting from the content.
• With content that consists of many chunks, such as a blog or a webshop, you could consider making separate requests per chunk, for example per blog post or per product description.

Secondly, we advise you to keep your order size at most at 1500 words, which is about 3 pages of text. This size is manageable for both you and the translator. You will be able to keep oversight on your translations when you are reviewing them. It also allows the translator to keep oversight when translating your content.

Optimise quality and budget

When you are sizing and bundeling different parts of your website or e-commerce system, please take into consideration that different parts of your website may require different quality levels for translation. A complete overview of our different quality levels and the texts they apply to can be found in the Pricing and Quality section.

You may want to translate your marketing texts on a high quality level, but product descriptions, for example, will also turn out very well on a lower quality level. Make sure you spend the right amount on the right texts!

Don't hesitate to contact us for assistance

If you need any help with deciding which elements are relevant for you, and which choices suit your needs, don't hesitate to contact us. Our experts can provide you with all the support you need.

We offer developer support for API integration. Please contact us using [email protected] or use the support button on the right bottom of your screen.