Turkish Website Translation

Translation is the smaller half of the job

A translated website is not a website with the sentences swapped. Text expands and contracts between languages, and a navigation label that fits in English can break a menu in German or Russian. Turkish agglutination produces long single words where English uses several short ones. Arabic runs right to left, which affects layout, iconography, form fields and the direction of anything with an implied arrow of time. Chinese needs no word spacing and different line-breaking behaviour. None of this is visible in a spreadsheet of strings, and all of it is visible on the page.

We therefore ask to see the site, not just the copy. Where content is delivered as a string file or a content management system export, we still want to know where each string appears, because the correct translation of a two-word label depends entirely on whether it is a button, a heading or a table column.

What has to be translated that people forget

Beyond body copy: page titles and meta descriptions, image alternative text, form labels, validation and error messages, email templates triggered by the site, cookie and privacy notices, currency and date formats, and the text inside images. Alternative text and error messages are the two most commonly missed, and they are the two that matter most to people using assistive technology in the target language.

Search visibility in the target language

Translating a page well and translating it findably are different objectives, and pretending otherwise produces sites that read beautifully and attract nobody. The phrase your customers actually search for in Turkish is often not the literal translation of your English keyword. We work from the terms people use rather than from a dictionary rendering, while keeping the copy natural, because keyword-stuffed text repels the human who eventually arrives.

On the technical side, a multilingual site needs each language version to be reachable at its own stable URL and to declare its relationship to the other versions, so that a search engine understands they are alternates rather than duplicates. Getting this wrong is a common reason a well-translated site underperforms. This site is built the same way, so we are describing something we maintain rather than something we have read about.

Maintenance

A translated site is a commitment, not a delivery. When the English changes, every other language drifts, and a site whose Turkish pages describe last year's services is worse than a site with no Turkish pages. Plan for who updates the translations and how they will know an update is needed, before launch rather than after the first divergence.

Related reading: how to translate your website for a Turkish audience, professional translation for tourism businesses and translating technical documents. See also Turkish Business Translation.