Simon Otter, Technical Manager, TheBigWord
Simon Otter is the group technology manager at thebigword, with overall responsibility for the technology and the associated processes used in creating integrated, efficient translation services.
Much of Otter’s role involves working with customers to understand their technical and process requirements and adapting technology to fit their needs. An early starter in IT, Otter began pro- gramming at the age of eight and after graduating in software engineering, held several IT posi- tions with the Ford Motor Company, creating localized public-facing software solutions, among many other projects. He is a Chartered IT Professional, member of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Engineer.
Thebigword is one of the largest translation companies in the world. Its web site is translated into nine different languages, and the company offers translation services to more than 3,000 clients in 77 languages.
Jerri: Tell me about your perspective on SEO localization.
Otter: We have been thinking about and developing how we should handle SEO for clients asking us to localize their web sites. It’s quite a dark art, and everyone thinks different about SEO. For some, it’s just keywords and meta tags, and those customers want them translated, but there’s much more to it. There are many different inputs that go into the mix of how to choose one keyword or another.
Typically, SEOS try to expand their keyword lists to other related keywords and compound phrases or terms and then build the needed content around these. And when you’re doing it in one language, there’s an almost subliminal process that goes into finding synonyms and related keywords, because it’s your language and you recognize the keywords and phrases that will work for less money. There is a lot of careful selection and discarding of keywords.
When you’re working with a multi-lingual site, it isn’t that easy. When you go into another language, you immediately have a language barrier. What we propose to do is find the people who are enabled to translate but are also able to interpret the results once they’re translated to see what words are still relevant.
As it stands, if an English-based company were to translate their site into German, the keywords could be translated, but the company wouldn’t know what the words were. They could see the metrics for them, but they can’t read the words, so it’s difficult to tell if they’re the right keywords.
Once you translate something to another language, there is a usually a choice of words. Some of those words will have the same meaning as the English keywords, but others will not. And you don’t want to use the keywords that don’t translate into your message.
We propose to work within an SEO environment in a multi-lingual environment. We could trans- late the keywords into another language and then an SEO coordinator could review that translation and discard the words that are not relevant. Once you’ve translated the words, and expanded your [second language] keyword list, then you must see if the words are still relevant, and if they are back translated-translated translated back to English-are they also still relevant?
Our thinking is around liberating the SEO environment. Once translated, then we could build a glossary that whenever you translate one word, this is what you should use for this word in this language. Then you could write all of the content around those keywords. And it would be based on the keywords that have already been examined and carefully chosen.
Jerri: Does the localized way people think affect how they consider SEO localization?
Otter: The way people think does play a role in localization. I think it does. An American might not think of localization as much as people in other countries do, but that’s changing. A lot of edu- cation is required to help people understand the need to present localized web sites, but I would say it varies by corporate culture.
We suggest that you find an SEO partner when you’re localizing your web site. We don’t recommend hiring an individual, because in our experience, individuals aren’t equipped to handle localization. Find a partner that specializes in translation, because a company like that has more resources and can return a translation to you that’s been validated or approved.
Once you’ve decided what keywords you want, you can build a glossary of those terms so the next time a word comes up, the proper translation for that word is already decided upon. Another tool you can use is a translation memory.
A translation memory allows you to analyze your pages against the translation memory to leverage existing translations. This is a method that’s often used in translation to speed the process and to keep the content consistent.
Translators come and go. But you need consistency and you need to achieve the correct translations as quickly as possible.
We also work with our clients to understand their link structure. Links are important in SEO, but translating a link is a little more difficult than translating a word or phrase. So we work with clients to understand their link structure. So we do essentially a translation of the links on a page to make it possible to contain a link hierarchy.
