Can I translate my website with DeepL?
You’re feeling pretty good about yourself: your website is almost ready for its launch. Now all what needs to be done is the translation.
How can you get a website translated? Your friends and colleagues say: just use DeepL! And yes, you can certainly use automatic translation services like DeepL for translating your website. It’s so fast and cheap! Especially if you just need a quick basic translation for your quick and basic (superficial) content. If that’s the case, then yes, it works very well.
Oh, hang on a second… Your content is not superficial at all. Your content has significance. You take your reader seriously. Suddenly you’re in doubt: will a translation by DeepL get you enough conversion?
Machine translations such as for example DeepL perform worse in search engines
Your website is intended to connect with your customers. SEO impact is therefore crucial in website translation. SEO (optimising your content so that it can be better found by search engines like Google) doesn’t work very well with automatically translated content. In fact, a website translated by an actual translation team, with real people, performs much better in terms of SEO.
6 reasons to opt for a translation team with real translators for your website translation:
- Translation machines struggle with delivering optimised, search engine-friendly content. Quality is important for search engines; texts translated by humans are more unique and can therefore be found more easily. Search engines prefer unique content; the use of DeepL may lead to duplicated content, which may negatively affect your site’s ranking. Automatic translations are not well-attuned to specific search patterns. It’s a machine, so you end up with a bit of a “one–size-fits-all” situation.
- Translators often talk about content quality. Automatic translations are sometimes awkward or grammatically incorrect, factors that drastically reduce content quality. If a reader accesses your website, the quality of your content should reflect the quality of your service or product. If the quality of the website translation is poor, the visitor will immediately lose trust in what you offer. And you will lose your moment to connect.
- An automatic translation tool doesn’t consider local search habits. It’s just a machine. Machines have no empathy and cannot think critically or independently. Human translators understand local search habits better. They also consider the area in which the target reader lives and works. And they use more natural language. Automatic translations lack the nuances of local search queries. This may prevent you from connecting with a potential customer who visits your website.
- Search engines prefer unique content. Don’t trust DeepL to have perfect command of the language you want to have your text translated into. Text optimisation is always necessary. If you add automatically translated content without further optimisation to your carefully crafted website, it may lead to content duplication. An automatic translation tool looks for what makes the most sense, more or less in context. It finds that context somewhere on the internet. Consequently, your content is no longer unique. Your site’s ranking is thus negatively affected. In other words: your site will become more difficult to find.
- Automatic translations are not perfect. Humans aren’t perfect either, but with a translation team a second translator always checks if the translation is correct. Then a third person does a final check. DeepL and others make many mistakes, especially with complex sentences, industry-specific terminology or culturally sensitive contexts. It’s essential that you can be sure that the meaning is conveyed exactly as you intended.
- Cultural nuances are often misunderstood by translation machines. For your original texts, you may have thought carefully about who you want to reach. If you use a translation machine like DeepL, there is a risk that the care you devoted to writing the source text will not come through in the target text. After all, a machine has neither empathy nor feelings. This can lead to translations that do not align properly with the culture of the target reader.
But DeepL is cheaper for my website translation than a team of translators, right?
In a word, yes. With DeepL, you can translate your website very cheaply. The question, however, is: what does it yield? What‘s the point of having a bright and shiny multilingual website if no one can find it? If your website cannot generate clicks online, it won’t get you any new customers.
Our translation team is inclusive and accessible. We know how to help you be inclusive and accessible for your target audience. If the expense of translating a website is too much for you to pay at once, you can request a quote and we can discuss payment terms.
A machine won’t do that for you 😉
