Do you really need to translate that?

I found myself in the happy position a few months ago of selling the Italian translation rights to my novel, What Ends. But with my digital strategy hat on, this put me in the somewhat less happy position of knowing I had zero Italian digital presence — meaning it would be harder for any prospective Italian readers to find me if they were searching.

In some ways, actually, I'm lucky when it comes to Italian search traffic: Andrew Ladd ain't exactly a common Italian name, so people searching for me from Italy are likely to find my website anyway, even though it's in English, because there just aren't that many other Italian results out there. (In fact, my ranking in Italian Google searches is higher than my ranking on English ones, often in the top 5, and with a 36% clickthrough rate — meaning one out of every three people who searches for Andrew Ladd on Italian Google ends up on my website.)

But that doesn't mean I couldn't do better. For one thing, once my book nears publication in Italy, there will (hopefully) be many more Italian sites talking about it, like my publisher, and reviewers, and other readers — and once that happens, my English-language pages will drop lower. For another, ranking highly for "Andrew Ladd" is only really helpful for people who've already heard of me; having Italian language pages would help me rank in Italian for things other than my uniquely anglo name, and hence reach a wider audience. Most importantly, though, from a purely human perspective, I thought it would be nice if Italian readers ended up on an Italian page.

So far, I'm probably not saying anything too surprising. If you want to serve non-English audiences, you need to have non-English content. Often, though, when I discuss this with clients at my day job, they think that means translating the whole website, just in case — and that's very much not true.

Instead, I decided to focus on just the pages that would be relevant to these someday Italian searchers: the What Ends page, and the homepage, and a few other tangentially related ones about my writing. Certainly there was no need to translate any of my digital strategy stuff, or the extensive listings of English-language short stories and essays that aren't available in Italian anyway. That would just be creating extra work with no particular payoff. An AI could have translated these pages in no time, of course, but why? They'd just be cluttering up the Italian internet for no good reason.

The other benefit of focusing on a few key pages is that I could make sure they got translated properly. I'm privileged that I actually speak some Italian, and have many family members who speak Italian as a native language, so I was able to put together human-translated pages for free, rather than paying a translator or relying on an AI or other machine translation service. But I always tell my clients they should do the same thing: spend some money to have a human translate your most important content properly, instead of getting a machine to do it for free. Even modern AI translations are not that great (yet), and particularly if you have a particular tone of voice or mood you want to maintain, you shouldn't trust a machine to get that nuance. Five well translated pages is going to show you in a much better light than fifty garbled ones.

This kind of mentality goes for everything, not just translating text. You can get software that will automatically translate your whole website, including your navigation menu and any other functional text (as opposed to your actual content). But again: why? If my Italian visitors weren't going to be interested in every page on my English site, why should I just present them a translated version of my English menu? Why should I present them with the usual prompt to switch between my author site and my digital strategy site?

A much better experience for Italian visitors would be to show them a stripped back, simplified version of the site, which highlights the things they're likely to be interested in. So What Ends has its own, top-level menu item on the Italian author site, rather than being a sub-page of "My writing" — and then there's a new top-level menu item called "Other writing" alongside it. And on pages where there might be more information available in English, or where even an Italian speaker might be interested in reading the original (like on a blog post), there are clear, automated links back to equivalent English pages, if someone wants them.

Meanwhile, on the English pages, there's no "change language" link or menu in the main navigation, as you often see on translated sites. If you open the site menu, there is a "Read in Italian" link right at the bottom, but in general if you're an English reader you're not going to be sidestepping around constant, obtrusive suggestions to read an Italian translation you have no interest in.

Instead, the site now detects if you have Italian set as your system or browser language, and offers you one of two messages if so: if the page you're visiting is available in Italian, it asks if you want to go there; if there's no equivalent Italian page, it asks if you want to go to the Italian homepage. In both cases, it also gives you the option to dismiss further notices. In other words, if you're an Italian speaker who wants Italian content, you can easily get to it, but if you're an Italian reader who's comfortable in English and would rather read the original, you're not constantly fighting against annoying pop-ups telling you to go to the Italian homepage.

All of which to say... Before you reach for that easy-to-use translation service, think about whether you really need it. Your foreign-language website users are still website users before they're foreign language speakers — so you shouldn't flatten them into a single requirement or desire like "Do the same thing, but in Italian." Foreign-language visitors have their own things that they're trying to accomplish on your website, so think about how to let them do those things efficiently, same as you would with any other visitor. That's going to make for a much better experience than just slapping a machine-generated translation on top of everything and riding off into the sunset.