Translation Services
Website translation that reads like it was written there. Multilingual sites in 300+ languages, from pages and product listings to page titles and alt text.
Website translation services convert the pages of your site into another language so that visitors who do not read English can actually use it. The job covers more than the visible copy: page titles, meta descriptions, navigation, buttons, forms and image alt text all need translating too. Prism Linguistics translates web content into more than 300 languages, using native-speaker translators with a second linguist reviewing every job.
Your website is often the first thing a buyer in another country sees of your business. If it reads as though it went through a free tool, that is the impression they keep. Send us the URL or a content export and you will have a fixed quote within one working hour during office hours.
A multilingual website is not one site with a language dropdown bolted on. It is a proper version of your content for each market, with its own pages, its own page titles and its own place in the search results. That is the standard we work to, whether the site is a fifteen-page consultancy brochure or a catalogue running to several thousand products.
Most of the work arrives in a few shapes. Exporters adding two or three European languages before a trade show. UK service firms whose enquiry data shows a steady trickle from one country. Councils and charities publishing information in the community languages their residents actually speak. Software companies translating the marketing site while the product itself goes through localisation services separately.
Website work sits inside our wider translation services, so the same native-speaker translators and the same second-linguist review apply. There is no cheaper web-only tier where the checking step quietly disappears.
This is where most website translation projects come unstuck. The paragraphs get translated, everyone signs off, and then a visitor clicks something and hits English again. A full website content translation covers:
Ask any agency for a quote and see whether that list appears in it. If the quote covers visible page copy alone, the gaps turn up at the worst moment, usually the week of launch.
No account, no minimum spend, and nothing that needs installing before we can start.
Send a list of URLs, a sitemap, or a content export. Most systems produce XLIFF, XML, CSV or JSON; a spreadsheet with one string per row works fine too. Where an export is awkward, we can work inside the content system directly on a limited editor login.
We agree a short glossary of your product names, job titles and anything you never want translated, plus a note on tone and on how formally you address the reader. Ten minutes here saves a rewrite later.
A native-speaker translator does the work and a second linguist reads it against the source. Files come back in the format you sent them, with tags, placeholders and IDs intact, so your developer imports rather than retypes.
Once the content is in, a linguist reads the built pages. Truncated headings, a stray English button, a form label that no longer fits its box: these only show up on screen. Our proofreading service covers this pass if you would rather book it separately.
There is no point translating a page beautifully if nobody finds it. People search differently in different countries, and the highest-volume phrase in one language is rarely a word-for-word rendering of the highest-volume phrase in another. A German buyer looking for what you sell may well type a compound noun that has no tidy English equivalent.
So we research the target market rather than translating your keyword list, and the translated page title and meta description are written to earn a click in that market. Two technical points sit with your developer rather than with us, but are worth knowing. Each language needs its own indexable URL, whether that is a subfolder, a subdomain or a separate domain. And hreflang tags tell Google which version to show to which visitor, which is what stops your English page outranking your Spanish one for Spanish searchers.
One thing that costs nothing: do not publish machine output and plan to tidy it later. Search engines are increasingly good at spotting it, and so are customers. If budget is tight, translate fewer pages properly instead.
Online shops carry a particular kind of volume: hundreds or thousands of short, repetitive strings rather than a few long pages. Product titles, descriptions, category and filter names, attribute values, size tables, delivery and returns wording, checkout steps and post-purchase emails. Every one of those is a place a shopper can lose confidence and abandon a basket.
The repetition works in your favour. Ecommerce website translation is where translation memory pays for itself fastest, because the same phrases recur across a catalogue and you pay full rate for each of them only once. Send a product feed as CSV or XML and we will quote on the whole catalogue or on your top sellers first.
Some things on a shop are adaptation rather than translation: currency display, sizing conventions, address fields, the order of first and family names. Those sit on our localisation page, and we will tell you which genuinely affect conversion in your market rather than charging for the lot.
WordPress runs a large share of the sites we are asked to translate, so a WordPress website translation is familiar ground. We also work with Drupal, Sitecore, Shopify and various bespoke builds. What matters is not the badge on the admin screen but whether content can come out and go back in cleanly.
Two routes, then. Either you export the content and we return translated files in the same structure, ready to import, or you give us an editor-level login and we place the text in the system ourselves. The export route is usually faster and keeps your developer in control. The in-CMS route suits smaller sites where nobody fancies wrestling with an export plugin.
Right-to-left languages are worth mentioning early, because they affect the build and not only the words. If Arabic translation is on your list, raise it with your developer at the start rather than the week before launch.
Few websites stand still. New products, a revised services page, a blog nobody remembered to include in the original scope. We keep a translation memory and glossary for your site, so each time you send an update we translate only what is genuinely new and reuse wording you have already approved.
The bill shrinks, because you are not paying twice for the same paragraph, and terminology stays consistent, so the product is not called one thing on the home page and something else in the FAQ six months later. Most clients settle into a rhythm: they send the month's new and changed pages, we return them, and the site stays current in every language.
For print collateral produced alongside the site, our brochure translation service uses the same memory so the wording matches. If you also produce video, subtitles are handled through subtitling.
Web content is priced per source word, which is fairer than per page because pages vary wildly. Four things move the figure: the total word count, the language pair, the subject matter and how many languages you are launching at once. Standard business copy sits at the lower end of our per-word range; technical, legal or clinical material sits higher; genuinely rare languages higher still, simply because fewer qualified translators exist. Repetition pulls the cost back down through translation memory, and optional extras such as keyword research or a staging proofread are quoted separately so you can take them or leave them.
Our pricing page sets out honest ranges rather than one headline rate that would be wrong for half the jobs we see. For your site, send the URL or an export through the quote form and a project manager replies within one working hour during office hours, with a fixed price and a realistic date.
Contracts, reports and certificates are handled by our document translation team, and anything needing a signed statement of accuracy sits under certified translation. If the thing being translated is a product rather than a website, meaning interface strings, resource files, an app or an e-learning course, start with localisation services. Language pages such as Polish translation services and German translation cover single-language work, and the full language list has the other three hundred.
Send us the URL or a content export and tell us your target markets. We will quote on the scope that suits you, within one working hour during office hours.