Website localization is a complex and demanding process. The preferences of website users vary from country to country, so simply translating into a foreign language is not enough. The content, images, and colors on the website are just a few elements that should be adapted to the preferences of the local recipient. Therefore, it is important to work with experienced translators and localization specialists to ensure effective and efficient adaptation to target markets.
TEKOM Technologia has been specializing in GPS vehicle monitoring technology for over 35 years. It is also a certified supplier of hardware and applications used in the e-TOLL collection systems, as well as the owner of the www.etoll.pl portal. Our task was to localize the client’s website to Ukrainian.
The Customer’s website is administered by an external IT company, so contact and all technical issues regarding the website required the approval of the Customer and an external specialist. This was a challenge, because we were dealing with an extensive website, including information about products and services. In such cases, it is very important to preserve the intention of the message, the consistency of communication and the unique brand identity after translation. Any obstacle in communication or misunderstanding of the intentions of the other party could result in a serious disruption of the entire process.
Fortunately, the worries were unnecessary. Communication with the client and the IT specialist was seamless. We had one goal and we directed our activities in this direction. In order to achieve this goal in a comprehensive manner, a decision was made to use the WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) plugin. This plugin has been successfully used by the Skrivanek translation agency for years.
We started our work by exporting the content from the site using the WPML plugin. Here we encountered a problem, because not all of the content of the portal was downloaded for translation. However, we’ve dealt with similar projects before and knew that WPML doesn’t always work with all themes and custom fields. Therefore, we quickly determined that also in this case the difficulty turned out to be the fact that the client’s website has its own theme designed for individual needs by an IT company. After several attempts to re-export, we found a solution.
Due to the complexity of the service, the client also wanted SEO optimization to achieve high positions in search results for relevant queries in the target language. Here, the challenge was to choose the correct key words in Ukrainian, but for the Polish market, not Ukrainian. With the help of the appropriate tools at our disposal, we were able to identify the most promising items that our experienced translator wove into adapting the text to the page to make it sound most natural to the recipient.
In addition to adapting the content to the realities of the target language, it was also important for the client to maintain the visual layout, the layout of page elements, so that new users would have a positive experience using the portal. Here the perfect solution is the testing service, which Skrivanek also has in its range of services. After loading the ready-made texts to the website via the WPML plugin, the translator had an additional task to check it in terms of functionality (e.g. whether the buttons on the page direct to the right places) and in terms of language (whether the text is not too long in places, needs reformulation, or is sufficiently legible for the recipient – is not misleading in any way).
Thanks to the additional service, we managed to catch a few quite important issues. Among other things, we removed unnecessary spaces/punctuation between words, but also corrected the notation of URLs. The addresses seemed complicated and contained a lot of unnecessary special characters like %%%% mixed up with many numbers, like here:
The solution was to correct all addresses to include Latin characters:
Thanks to this, the address texts corresponded to the content on a given subpage, i.e. they were changed to be user-friendly.
Working on the project of localizing the e-TOLL website into Ukrainian provided us with new challenges, but also gave us great fun. After this project, we see that properly directed communication is the key to success. Thanks to the use of joint solutions and cooperation with professional suppliers, the company has succeeded in adapting its website to the requirements of the new market, ensuring high quality of the message and adapting it to the target user.
If you are planning similar projects, please contact Skrivanek. We have been active on the translation market for over 30 years. Thanks to professionalism and gained experience, we can handle the most demanding project.
