LanguageLine Blog

Need Multiple Languages with Little IT Support? Website Translation Proxy Is an Ideal Solution

Written by The LanguageLine Solutions Team | January 8, 2024

Website Translation Proxy. Sounds fancy! Tell me more.

What is it? Our website translation proxy tool is a cloud-based localization solution.

How does it work? Content is ‘crawled’ from your website and all translatable content is sent to our translation ecosystem.

Then what? The content is then organized to produce a localized mirror image of your source website, in real-time.

Why would I use this solution? This solution is perfect if your website is not already set up to handle multiple languages and you don’t have much IT support at hand. SmartMATE Website Translation Proxy makes localization easier, more consistent, and more efficient.

Is Website Translation Proxy the right solution for your website? Here are some frequently asked questions:

Is it secure? Yes. Our service is as secure as your website, as the proxy only sees the live content that is publicly available on your website. The proxy operates in a PCI compliant data center.

For added security, we can configure the service to ignore sections of pages, for example, text that comes after the words “Account Number”. This will ensure these strings are not captured for the translation queue or even evaluated by the proxy. If you would like to localize the content of a secure portal or intranet, for example, we would be able to do this, but may instead recommend one of our other solutions.

Can the translation proxy localize all content, including images? The translation proxy can translate and localize all of the content that is contained in the HTML. It cannot translate text in images, PDFs, or videos. You would need an external process to handle those translations, or replace them yourself.

How does the proxy identify new content? Whenever the proxy encounters any content for which it does not have any rules, it will register it as new content. This page processing can be initiated by either a visitor browsing or a spider ‘crawling’ through the website. If you want to develop translations before the content is live, you can point the proxy to a staging or test server.

Can I configure the proxy to exclude/include certain content? Of course, the proxy includes many flexible configuration tools.

Can the translated sites be different from the source site? Yes. We can configure rules to hide pages from the navigation or blocks of content on specific pages. Local sites can also override any page with permission and provide their own local content.

Does it work for dynamic pages? Yes. Translations are managed at a block (rather than a full page) level. Translations are applied whenever the proxy recognizes the same source content block.

Will it interfere with interactive functionality? No, not at all. Your source site continues to deliver interactive functionality such as search, contact forms, and even e-commerce.

The translation proxy simply translates the text that the visitor sees after it is generated by the source site.

Can I use this tool to add languages to my already localized website? Yes, and we offer over 180 languages, so you have plenty to choose from.

Can I make some in-context reviews of your translations? Of course, because the proxy acts as a mirror, we offer an overlay function where you can go into your localized website and directly change a piece of text.

Is my localized website hosted on a different domain? This can be arranged as you wish. Your localized website will function as part of your website on a subdomain or subfolder, depending on your preferences, for example: fr.website.com, or website.fr.

Are hyperlinks picked up, and how are they managed? When we crawl your website, we pick up all the content that is publicly available. This will include internal pages and subpages on your website and all other external links. The crawl tool will find and identify external links and will exclude them from the word count of your website.

This proxy tool is also able to replace external links to their localized equivalents, e.g. linking to google.fr instead of google.co.uk.

Will it work with my CDN (Content Delivery Network)? Yes, the translation proxy will work seamlessly with your CDN. You can point the translation proxy to your CDN. You can also put a CDN in front of the translation proxy. Your CDN will mainly deal with binary (images and multimedia) and static files (CSS, JS), and they will be ignored by the proxy.

Can an e-Commerce website use this tool? Using a proxy service for a large e-Commerce website can be quite complex, as e-Commerce websites will use a platform that is more tailored for e-Commerce. We would recommend looking at our other products for better integration. Website Translation Proxy could be used for other parts of your website, such as FAQs or contact us pages.

Can I leverage translation memory? We can import and export translation memories using the standard TMX format. It’s better to have one canonical Translation Memory (TM) to avoid the process of merging them together.

What is the cost? There are three pricing components:

  • Onboarding costs
  • Hosting costs
  • Translation costs

It’s hard to determine an exact cost without knowing your requirements. Aspects such as target languages, turnaround time, and industry content type all have an impact on the translation cost.

 

Does Website Translation Proxy sound like a good solution for your business? There's no time like the present, let's have a chat, one of our team will be thrilled to go through the options with you. To learn more and schedule a consultation, please visit our website