The world is full of different languages spoken by different ethnicities. There are up to 7000 languages that have been part of different groups and regions making the world a diverse planet. Not all these languages are equally popular.
Where few languages get along well with people’s choices and business projects, many others pose great challenges when these are adapted and modified for something unconventional.
With the ongoing advancements localization and globalization have become fundamental for businesses to compete in the global market.
Website language translation services have become a new normal and different translation vendors are available in the market who help you to achieve your business goals by providing quality translation.
Website translation services can encounter challenges with a variety of languages, depending on the specific functionalities of the service and the target language itself.
There are different categories of challenges that companies and localization experts face while translating websites.
Linguistic Challenges:
First of all, it is important to understand the languages’ linguistic composition and the challenges that they strike. Not all of these go well with the layout and formats of websites.
This is imperative that businesses are mindful of this fact before they start working on a language that is not very common or has different requirements.
Languages with complex grammar
Some languages have very complex and different grammar. All these languages come with complexities and have verb conjugation, and sentence structures along with the extensive use of the grammatical cases such as Hungarian and Finnish languages.
They can demand more effort to translate the content accurately while keeping a good balance and maintenance on the website, its functionality, and the user experience.
Right-to-Left vs. Left-to-Right Scripts
This is often one of the important concerns of the majority while dealing with website language translation services. Many languages are written from right to left, unlike Indo-European languages.
The right-to-left scripts can pose great challenges for localization and translation experts. The websites are typically developed for the left to right reading languages like English language and others.
However, the translation from right to left languages can require layout adjustment, alignment problems, and a lot more.
It gets tough to maintain the visual flow and user experience. Such languages may include Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, or Urdu.
Languages with a limited digital presence
Though machine translation tools have made their way to translation and have also proved their worth time and again it is important to note that not all languages come with a good digital presence.
There are a few languages that go well on search engines in terms of translation and other translation tools. All these languages have a smaller online presence and a lack of established tools.
This fact leads to situations that create hurdles for the people involved while executing the translation process. Nonetheless, collaborating with a professional company like CCJK can help you to perform better.
Technical Challenges:
Technical challenges are always there even for the smooth and popular languages as well. However, these get more complex for the languages that are different from the mainstream languages by any means.
Character Encoding
Character encoding is the basic process. There are different processes of coding for different languages. If your translation service fails to handle the character encoding properly this can make the overall text display and relevant issues messy. The website gives a cluttered look.
Therefore, it is extremely important to work with a website and software translation service provider who can ace the character encoding well and has a team of experts to fix such issues right away.
Special characters support
When it comes to website language translation or localization different domains and website formats work differently. There are some languages that have special characters and symbols which lack the support of translation tools.
Most of the translation tools work with languages such as English, French, Spanish, and other popular languages.
Even regular languages can also pose challenges with special characters. This way the format gets disturbed and it leads to missing and incorrect characters on the translated website.
The experts from CCJK though can contribute to making the process smoother as they have a professional team of translators and localization experts.
Integration with content management systems (CMS)
Likewise, not all languages are CMS-friendly. The website language translation demands integration with the content management system for smooth functioning.
However, many translation services also lack expertise when it comes to such technicalities. Moreover, working with a professional software translation service provider can make the process convenient.
Lacking the proper integration can make the whole process more complex hence requiring additional expertise.
Conclusion
Website language translation comes with multiple challenges. The selection of language is extremely imperative to avoid technical glitches and problems. Not all languages work in a similar pattern on websites and during integration.
The languages that the teams can face about unpopular languages may include linguistic challenges, grammar composition, right-to-left writing scripts, and languages with a limited digital presence.
Technical challenges such as character encoding, support for characters, and integration with CMS also get difficult for some languages.
