Could Website Translation Really Be This Easy?

By Marion Rhodes
English~German translator

I’m a sucker for a good webinar. Over the past two years or so, I’ve joined so many GoToMeeting sessions that I probably have enough credits for my own personalized translation degree by now. Alas, this morning, I attended a particularly interesting webinar by the Alexandria Project on income diversification for translators. I expected to come out with a few general ideas to implement in the future, but what I walked away with an hour later was much more concrete!

As a marketing translator, I find the prospect of translating entire websites for direct clients highly appealing. I have translated several tourism-related sites in the past for translation agencies, but I hadn’t given much thought to approaching website operators myself and offering my services. I am no html-wizard, and the IT side of website translation sends me running for the hills. Unless the client is willing and able to provide me with the content of the site in editable documents, I would have to copy and paste all the text into Word before I could even give an accurate word count, let alone start translating – a daunting task for a large website.

In this webinar, however, the presenter, Peter Faragó, introduced a simple way that will bring website translation projects from start to finish well within the reach of a mere freelance translator like me. The secret lies in the website translation tool Easyling, a subscription-based online service that takes the IT-part out of the website translation process and allows the translator to focus on the language part.

Easyling allows you to provide an instant quote for a website translation project within a few minutes, simply by plugging the website’s URL into the tool and waiting for it to generate the website’s word count. It then allows you to translate the content directly within the Easyling platform or extract the content into xliff-format to translate with your own CAT tool. Once the translation is complete, it can be imported into the website layout, still within Easyling, so it is easy to perform any fine-tuning within the visual context of the site. Finally, a new URL is created for the translated version of the site, which you can send to your client. All the client needs to do is register this new link and connect it to a language selection option on the main website. Mind blown.

To be honest, I haven’t tried this out myself yet beyond getting the word count for my own website, which was generated in 1:56 minutes. But the tool is intriguing, and I am definitely going to play around with it a little bit. As an attendee of this webinar, I received a free 6-month Gold membership to Easyling, which usually costs $60 a month. The cheapest option is $12 a month. Depending on how many websites you translate, this could be a worthwhile investment.

There’s only one caveat: Once you cancel your Easyling subscription, the translated sites you’ve prepared will disappear as well. After all, Easyling is a proxy service, and once you stop paying for the service, it stops. However, the translations you have prepared remain yours and can always be downloaded as XLIFF-files.

To see a brief overview of how Easyling works, watch this YouTube video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UlNZUskI9Q&w=560&h=315]

Or better yet, sign up for the next webinar on income diversification for translators by the Alexandria Project, which will be held on May 29. Seats are limited and fill up fast, so hurry.

I am interested if anyone has experience using this tool. If you have worked with Easyling, please be so kind and tell us about it in the comments. In the meantime, happy translating!