How we enhanced the quality of machine-translated content for a multilingual website of a Polish family-owned business

Reccreo, a family-owned business in the metal industry, specialises in manufacturing safe playground equipment. The integration of machine-translated content on their multilingual website allowed them to explore foreign markets. After initial successes, the need arose to validate the quality of the content, and to review and optimise it for better search engine visibility.

Read more to find out how locatheart experts and linguists handled this task!

Challenges and objectives

Our client used machine-translated content on their website, which they had generated independently, but its quality had not been verified or subjected to proper review, resulting in unnatural-sounding text.

The visibility of the client’s key webpages in search results was also of paramount importance. Consequently, locatheart was engaged to identify key phrases and optimise content for Reccreo’s target markets which included such languages as:

German

Italian

French

Dutch

Step 1: Project preparation – content audit

To lay the groundwork for our project, we conducted a language audit of the English version of the client’s website, assessing the quality of the existing content.

Our evaluation revealed that some corrections and stylistic adjustments were needed to render the text more natural.

Based on these findings, the client asked locatheart to perform similar audits on the other language versions of the site to ensure the quality of their key webpages.

You have foreign-language content on your website, but you’re uncertain about its quality?

Step 2: Review, retranslation, and optimisation

Following our audit and suggested changes, the client decided to revise content in English, German, Italian, and French. They also opted to retranslate their Dutch website, this time entrusting this task to a human professional.

Additionally, the content needed to be optimised for search engines, so locatheart conducted keyword research to identify the most common product-related queries in our client’s target markets.

During the review and retranslation process, we ensured that the content was enriched with appropriate keywords to enhance the site’s position in search results.

The review and retranslation were carried out by native speakers to ensure that the content resonated naturally with the target audiences.

Are you planning to enter foreign markets?

Conclusions

Machine translation generated by various plugins often fails to produce satisfactory outcomes. The resulting content often sounds awkward and, at times, even comical to the target audience. What’s more, critical keywords required for improved search engine rankings are often overlooked.

Modern translation engines perform reasonably well, but machine-translated content is most suitable for post-editing and optimisation – it should not be published without proper verification.

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