We saw some good sales figures from europe this year and thought we try having a website in 3 langauages. Anyone have any approx. costs for translating a retail clothing site into a different language? I'm no techie, so can someone explain how I go about doing this? Can I do it all under one domain? My current one? I could use some help. Thanks in advance...
Do you have the ability to ship to your target European customers? A lot of people get over-excited about translations and forget the practicalities (speaking from experience). There are payment processing issues with European countries - people like to see prices in their native currency, and bear in mind that a significant number of Europeans don't carry credit/debit cards. Therefore being able to accept payment options like Paypal and bank transfers are important if you want to make any serious progress in the marketplace. If you're hiring professional translators to translate your site, I'd say you're probably looking at about $125 per 1,000 words (based on translator rates in the UK), so it's best to figure out how much you need translating, and perhaps export text on your site to a spreadsheet to avoid any duplicated work. As for the technical side, you could host the translations on your existing domain in subdirectories (ie /fr/, /de/, etc), or set them up as subdomains (ie francais.xyz.com, etc). You could also buy the relevant TLDs and point them to these subdirectories - obviously the ideal solution would be to set up new domains for each TLD and sort out a hosting solution in the relevant countries, but that isn't mandatory. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the reply. We already do business internationally and ship worldwide. We were just curious what it would take to create our site in different languages. Thanks for the info. Guess we'll be investigating further.