Proven Ways to Translate a Website from English to Chinese in 2024 [+Step-By-Step Guide]

Recently updated on February 21st, 2024 at 08:26 pm

For foreign businesses that want to fuel their growth in China, a localized Chinese website is no longer merely an option to connect with your targeted audience, it has become a must.

According to Harvard Business Review, 72.4% of consumers said they’re more likely to purchase an item with information in their native language. People tend to spend longer time on websites in their native language, which means a higher conversion rate and increased revenue.

The most effective way to penetrate into the Chinese market is to translate a website from English to Chinese, build trust and loyalty that often converts to sales.

What’s Website Translation?

Website translation is the process of translating website content in a linguistically and culturally relevant way from one language to another. The primary purpose of website translation is to make the information accessible and usable to the targeted regional audience.

There’s a wide range of translatable content on a website:

• Static texts
• Images
• Videos
• PDFs
• URL slugs
• Dynamically loaded content from applications
• User notifications (error messages, confirmation messages)
• Invisible metadata for search engines (keywords, meta descriptions, ALT tags)

To provide a smooth, immersive in-language experience, all the translatable content should be translated with utmost care.

There’re different grades of web translation. The most known are website translation and website localization. The former usually refers to the translation of literal meaning with cultural nuances taken into consideration, while the latter is more extensive with extra website design elements, search engine algorithms taken into account. It requires a tremendous effort to craft posts, infographics, and other multimedia content from one language to another taking into consideration cultural nuances, SEO best practices, etc.

Why Should You Translate Your Website from English to Chinese?

Translating your website from English to Chinese helps expand your reach in your e-commerce business. It helps break the language barrier, tap into the Chinese market and create goodwill and confidence in your company.

Benefits of Translating Your Website into Chinese

China is, without doubt, one of the most attractive and promising markets in the world, therefore it’s often considered as an indispensable step for businesses who are planning for global expansion.

To make the most out of the huge market, it’s paramount to translate a website from English to Chinese with the utmost care.

• The world’s the second largest economy with a potential to surpass the US in 2030
• A strong base to build brand presence and reputation in China
• A strong platform to support any Chinese marketing strategies
• More engagement with your Chinese audience
• Display content that’s more likely to drive sales and increase revenue
• Improve your Baidu search volume with optimized Chinese content
• Keep up with or surpass your competitors

And this list continues. There’re innumerable perks when it comes to translating your website into Chinese.

Why Automatic Translation Tool is Not Recommended?

Translating a website from English to Chinese is a daunting task since the two languages are a world apart. While technology advances, translation tools and plugins try to fill the void, but they’re not the recommended ways to translate a website that represents your brand image.

The biggest concern is automated tools just do word-to-word translation, ignoring the nuances of semantic contexts and cultural relevancy, which tend to create nonsensical translations that damage brand reputation greatly.

Strategy to Translate a Website from English to Chinese

Once you decide that website translation is an indispensable part to sell in China, it’s time to choose the best method to serve your Chinese audience. It’s not a simple, one-size-fits-all solution to translate a website from English to Chinese.

Here’re two of the most common Chinese website translation options.

Translate the Entire Website

This is the most recommended for businesses that want to introduce to their Chinese audience a comprehensive, complete set of information about their brand. For large, complex websites it would require a generous budget as there’s loads of translatable content.

Depending on usages, the most common way of hosting Chinese content is setting up a .cn domain (mywebsite.cn) or a .cn subdomain/directory (cn.mywebsite.com, mywebsite.com/cn).

.cn Domain or com.cn Domain

Pros: More credibility. Faster loading speed, better user experience, easier to rank on baidu. More flexibility for website localization. It’s a good choice if you want the website to establish a distinct identity.

Cons: Annual domain cost, possible hosting cost if it’s hosted separately in Greater China. It’s equal to setting up a website from scratch so there’s loads of work involved.

.cn Subdomain/Directory

Pros: No domain cost, there’s no need to set up a new website from scratch as it’s created based on the existing website.

Cons: The design of the existing website might not be localized catering to Chinese aesthetics and search engine. The typesetting of English and Chinese characters is completely different, which means the Chinese translator should also make sure the length of the translation fits perfectly into the website especially content within a button/frame apart from translating the literal meaning. Slow loading speed. It’s not easy to rank on Baidu.

💡A directory with a country suffix (https://www.brandname.com/cn/) is the easiest and most common way to set up a Chinese interface, and it can be easily implemented with a WordPress plugin if your website is built on WordPress.

Translate Part of the Website

This is much preferred by businesses with smaller budgets or businesses that just entered the Chinese market. For some global companies with businesses covering various continents, they want to make the content highly relevant to the Chinese market, for instance, they wouldn’t want to translate business news of their branch office in South America and categorize it into the Chinese section.

💡It’s vital to decide which parts of the existing content should be translated and match with the budget. Important pages concerning the businesses like “About US”, “Our Service/Products”, “Contact Us” are usually translated while pages like “News”, “Articles”, “Reviews” are optional.

💡 A popular way to translate a website from English to Chinese is by adding a new menu to the main navigation, then building a menu of pages with Chinese relevant content. Another similar approach is creating digital marketing brochures in Chinese and attaching them to the Chinese section.

This allows you to provide the most valuable, relevant content to your Chinese audience at a lower cost and with less time investment.

What are Common Types of Websites for the Chinese Market?

The internet is flooded with billions of websites like stars in the galaxy. Though the sheer number of websites might be overwhelming, each site has specific objectives to accomplish too, those that need translation into Chinese are mostly these two types.

#1 Business/Corporate Websites

A business website is the face of the company, regardless of the scale of the business, each company should have an official website that displays the kind of service/products the company offers, the company value, team, founding history, etc. If your business/corporate website is in the language of your targeted audience, they tend to spend a long time on it, which leads to a higher conversion rate and increased revenue.

Therefore, it’s paramount to translate a website from English to Chinese if you want to fuel your growth in the Chinese market.

#2 e-Commerce Websites

An e-commerce website is a platform where users can browse product information and make purchases.

Proven Ways to Translate a Website from English to Chinese

Preparations

Translating a website from English to Chinese needs lots of planning and a good strategy, which might require the participation and constant communication of your cross-functional team and the Chinese translation agency.

First, you have to think about your Chinese marketing strategy, what’s the role of the Chinese website in your Chinese marketing strategy? Are you going to use it as a base to support all your marketing campaigns including PPC on Baidu? Or do you just need a simple Chinese section to introduce your business and service/products? Are you going to host the Chinese copywriting on a new .cn domain or a subdomain/directory? Do you want to translate the entire website or just part of it? Are you going to revise some content to make it more China-relevant?

💡Some invisible parts of the website tend to be neglected, for instance, the title of the webpage, keywords, description, alt tags of the images, error messages, confirmation messages, etc. It’s important to provide your Chinese translator with a complete website translation pack including a glossary of terminology if there’re any fixed translation terms like brand name, product name, etc as well as content with semantic context.

Live Testing

Completing the web content translation doesn’t mean the end of the project.

After loading the Chinese content, it’s paramount to do live testing and identify possible errors like semantic errors, distorted formatting, errors with fonts, invalid hyperlinks, etc. These errors can happen easily if the Chinese website translators are given original texts in Excel, Word formats that are different from the way they’re grouped on the website.

The writing of Chinese characters and English differ a lot, which can lead to poor formatting.

For instance, the English font available might not display the Chinese characters appropriately, the translation of the navigation falls apart in two lines instead of one.

Live testing is an indispensable step when it comes to website and APP localization for the Chinese market.

Legal Compliance Audit

Translating the literal meaning of the web content from English to Chinese is far from enough.

When it comes to selling in the Chinese market, an important part of website localization is to make sure the content is legally compliant. Your Mandarin translation services provider must have adept knowledge about forbidden terms as regulated by China’s Personal Information Security Law, Cyber Security Law, etc.

💡In addition, when it comes to marketing there’re some forbidden terms that you can’t use, for instance, “the best”, “the top”, “No. 1”. It’s important to do a legal compliance audit and make sure your online content doesn’t violate any law.

List of Chinese Marketing Terms You Should Avoid

To avoid running into any trouble when advertising in China, it is best to avoid words that sound too definite or extreme.

Here’s a list of terms you should definitely think twice about using in your Chinese marketing campaign.

SEO Audit

For websites to rank well on Baidu, an SEO audit is a must.

If your Chinese website is built based on an international WordPress template, the chance is high that it’s inbuilt with extra codes linking to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube that aren’t accessible from China, which would drag off the loading speed of your website, leading to poor user experience.

In this case, you should delete excessive codes or use templates catering to the Chinese market. Content for search engines is usually invisible, thus, they tend to be ignored.

There’re some significant differences between the Google algorithm and Baidu algorithm, for instance, the meta tag is no longer a valuable index element to Google but it helps rank on Baidu.

Here’re some Baidu SEO checklist: title, keywords, description, alt tags, meta tags, etc.

3 Simple Steps to Translate a Website from English to Chinese

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