The sad and harsh reality is that Brazil's audience is small, its website will yield much more if it seeks to reach new audiences, especially the English language. Today I am going to talk about how I translated my website into other languages even without knowing English.
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What are the Benefits of having a website in multiple languages?
In addition to the possibility of reaching people from all over the world, you can gain more authority in the domain, improve your ranking positions and greatly improve your CPC and earnings with Adsense and other advertisers.
If you translate your original articles from Portuguese into English you will catch a large part of the world population, hundreds of countries have English as their primary or secondary language. Not to mention that even in Brazil we do research in English.
You can also translate your original content to reach more specific audiences in certain countries that don't have a well-explored or competitive niche. Fortunately WordPress has tools that facilitate such work.
The problems of having a website in multiple languages
Unfortunately it's not all about flowers, translating a site into other languages in the wrong way can negatively affect your site's SEO, confuse visitors and weigh your server's database.
That is why a natural translation with fluent in a certain language is recommended, but unfortunately it is not cheap. Although some insist that Google Translate translations are not good, it still brings significant results.
If used with caution, Google translate can translate entire WordPress pages fully formatted into Gutenberg blocks, you just need to proofread and fix stupid errors that you can find even without knowing the language.
If you leave these constant errors quite noticeable, this will certainly leave these articles in limbo, mainly because the competition in the American market is very strong. So be careful when doing your site translations.
What I shouldn't do when translating a website
Some get desperate and resort to plugins that simply put a side widget for people to choose the language, but such a tool translates the site at the time of opening, not collaborating in anything with SEO, making your site not be found.
Perhaps the person thinks that this is the easiest way to deliver the site to hundreds of languages at once. Unfortunately, no Venezuelan or Arab will find your site, because on Google it will appear only in Portuguese.
You should also not write articles in other languages and play on your website or in a different category. You need a Language Plugin, which uses SEO and which places hreflang tags in articles in Portuguese to point out its existence in another language.
Just like that, with a bit of effort you will be able to rank in other languages. Remember that you do not inherit total authority in the Serps simply by publishing articles in new languages; it will take time to gain authority in a new language.
I currently use Polylang which is completely free, easy to configure, supports SEO and allows you to translate the layout and specific points of your theme, category and more. For me it is the best translation plugin, although they have more popular ones.
Some make the mistake of putting the website's language on another subdomain, with the idea of not negatively affecting the site's SEO. It's a smart and cautious idea, but you inherit absolutely nothing from SEO for new languages, making it a more difficult task.
How I translated my website skdesu.com
I have been trying to translate my main site skdesu.com into English and Japanese for some years now, in future other languages. I did this manually by copying block by block and creating new articles in different languages using polylang.
Unfortunately, this process was time-consuming, copying and pasting multiple blocks for a single article. I tried to resort to other plugins that allowed automatic translations, but I found their prices quite steep. Until I found a solution in polylang itself.
Within Polylang there is a free Add-On called LingoTek, a cloud translation company that works using the Polylang plugin. In this company you can request automatic translations and also from human persons.
I knew about this plugin that Poylang suggested for years, but I never knew it was so useful, I thought it was expensive and complicated. It had a free version that allowed to translate 100,000 characters. I tried to try such a function.
In one day using this test, I realized that the limit was strange and I ended up translating more than 100 articles with more than 100,000 words. I came to think that the limit was per article, so I received a deadly email that my test limit was over.
I got scared when reading an email from them that instead of offering something paid, they simply asked for a Google Translate or Bing Translate API, I made that API and managed to translate my articles better than before. Without spending a dime.
The good that Google offers $ 300 for you to spend with your tools. The Google Translation API charges $ 20 per 1,000,000 characters. I believe that $ 300 is more than enough to translate my 2,000 articles into English and other languages.
The translation is done simply by clicking to send the article in Portuguese to the ligotek site and then clicking to upload it in English. The article is published; I just need to correct some errors that appear, taking less than 3 minutes.
Well, I hope my experience will help you in deciding to translate the articles on your website into another language. If you liked this short article, share and leave your comments.