For most companies their website is their shop window. It captures their audience’s attention and allows users to discover the information they’re looking for about their business or its products.
And if this is your business, it does this while demonstrating your brand and maintaining its integrity.
So, the stakes are high when you’re moving into a new market with a new language. How do you make sure you not only make the user experience (UX) equal to its English parent site but also avoid any cultural or legal pitfalls?
As a Language Service Provider (LSP), we’re used to navigating these pitfalls with our clients. Here, we’ve compiled a list of the major challenges we make our clients aware of during the translation process, and our advice on how to overcome them.
1. Assuming Direct Translation Is Enough
One of the most common mistakes you can make is treating translation as a purely linguistic exercise. A word-for-word translation often fails to capture tone, context, and cultural nuance.
What sounds polished and professional in English can easily come across as awkward,
confusing, or even offensive in another language.
For instance, idioms like “get the ball rolling” don’t always have meaningful equivalents in other languages.
“Think outside the box”, for example, when translated into Mandarin Chinese is “jump out of the frame to think,” which tends to dilute the thought.
Literal translations may confuse readers or obscure your message. It’s essential to work with native speaking translators who understand both the language and the cultural context.
2. Overlooking Localization
Translation is just one part of the larger process called localization, which involves adapting content, images, colors, date formats, and units of measurement for your target culture.
A“translated” site that still shows prices in dollars, displays US holidays, or references English-only resources will feel foreign and impersonal to your users.
Localization goes beyond language; it’s about creating an experience that feels native to the audience. This can mean changing visuals, modifying navigation, and rewriting content to fit in with local customs, attitudes, and values.
3. Neglecting SEO in the Target Language
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in driving traffic to your site. However, keywords that work well in English might not be the same in another language. Directly translating SEO terms often misses how people actually search.
Each language and region has its own specific search behavior. Conducting proper keyword research in the target language is essential. Otherwise, your beautifully translated site might never appear in search results, which means you’ve wasted your investment.
4. Inconsistent Brand Voice
The way your company speaks to people is a key part of your brand identity. If the translated website sounds different from your original tone, either more formal, more casual, or simply off-brand, it can confuse users or dilute your message.
To avoid this, create a style guide that explains your tone, vocabulary preferences, and writing goals. Share it with your translation team to help them maintain consistency with your brand across languages.
5. Ignoring Technical Constraints
Websites may look like just text and imagery, but they’re more than that. At their heart, they’re code. Translating content can affect design and functionality.
Some languages, like German or Finnish, tend to be wordier, potentially breaking layouts. Others, like Arabic or Hebrew, read right-to-left, requiring substantial user interface (UI) adjustments.
Content management systems (CMS) also vary in their ability to support multilingual setups. Not all are built with translation in mind, and improper implementation can lead to duplicated content, broken links, or misaligned metadata. This leads to frustrated users and less engagement with your audience.
6. Failing to Account for Legal and Regulatory Differences
Different countries have different legal standards for web content. These can include rules around data privacy (like GDPR in Europe), accessibility requirements, or mandatory disclaimers.
If your translated website fails to comply with local laws, it could expose your company to fines or reputational damage. Always consult with local legal experts during the localization process to ensure compliance.
7. Lack of Ongoing Maintenance
Languages evolve. Market conditions change. A translated website isn’t a one-time project, it requires updates and ongoing support. If your English site is regularly updated, the translated versions must follow suit.
Too often, businesses launch multilingual sites and fail to maintain them, leaving outdated information that can confuse users, misrepresent the brand or make regions feel like they’re an afterthought. Establish workflows and tools for regular updates across all your language versions.
Avoid the Pitfalls
Your localized website shouldn’t just speak for you in another language, it should speak to another culture. The best way to avoid the pitfalls is to partner with a good LSP that’s seen the challenges before and knows how to guide you through the translation of your website.
They’ll minimize the risks of miscommunication, technical issues and cultural problems. Done right, your localized websites will allow you to build trust, engagement and new opportunities for growth and profit.
Do you have a website that needs to be translated? If so, we’d love to talk to you. Consultations are free and there’s no obligation.
You’re in safe hands with us as we’re ISO 17100 and ISO 9001 compliant, have over twenty years of professional translation experience, and have earned the trust of organizations around the world.
