By Aleksandra Kneifel

This article is edited from a Modlingua internship assignment submitted in July 2018. It preserves the author's reflection on search visibility. Unsourced click percentages, obsolete product references and promises of automatic ranking gains have been removed. Current Google guidance is linked in an editorial clarification below.

A question about a river, a shop's opening hours or a repair service can lead to a search. In my assignment, I used these everyday examples to think about another question: how can translators and multilingual writers make their services easier for potential clients to find?

A website needs to be found

I compared a website with a small shop on a street that few people pass. The shop may have useful products and an attractive interior, but people still need to discover it. The comparison helped me separate the quality of a service from the problem of making that service visible.

For a translator, a website can explain what work is offered and which language pairs it covers. Search visibility was one route I considered for bringing that information to people looking for it. It was not the only possible source of clients, nor a guarantee that a visitor would make an enquiry.

Thinking about the searcher's purpose

My original discussion placed strong emphasis on reaching the first search results. I wanted to show why the location of a result could matter when someone was choosing among services.

I also used the image of a beach-accessories shop being closer to beach visitors. The useful point was the match between a service and the people who might need it. Online, that means making the page's purpose understandable, rather than assuming that any traffic is equally valuable.

Multilingual content and different readers

I saw multilingual writing as an opportunity to explain a service to more than one language audience. A reader may understand a page more easily when the service and its terms are described in a language they use.

This applies to the way a translator presents language pairs too. My assignment mentioned different pairings to illustrate the range of possible audiences, not to claim that I personally worked in all of them.

Adding another language can make information available to another group of readers. It does not automatically make the website appear prominently in another country or produce clients. The translated content still needs to be useful and the language version needs to be discoverable.

An editorial clarification on search

The original assignment included click percentages without an identifiable study and made broad claims about multilingual pages appearing in search results. Those figures and guarantees are not repeated here.

Google Search Central's guidance on helpful content explains that its ranking systems consider many factors and recommends content created for people. A clear description of a service is useful to readers; it should not be treated as a shortcut to a particular ranking.

For language versions, Google's January 2023 search discussion recommends separate URLs for each language and links between the versions so that users and search engines can find them. This is a practical distinction between having translated text and making each version accessible.

The lesson for a language professional

The question I began with was about standing out among many services. My conclusion was that multilingual content could help explain a translator's work to different readers. The lasting lesson is to connect visibility with clear information about the service, the language pair and the audience, without promising results that the assignment did not measure.