By Sachin Kumar
This article is edited from a Modlingua internship assignment submitted in July 2018. It records the author's views at that time. Unsupported statistics have been removed, wording copied from a general reference has been replaced with a link to the source, and advice has been checked against Google's published guidance.
Why does a high place in Google search results matter, and how can translators and multilingual writers benefit? In my assignment I looked at both questions and at what they mean for my own language pair, Portuguese and English.
Why visibility in search matters
The aim of any website is to be seen. For a business website, it needs to be seen by potential customers. Many visitors arrive through a search engine, and Google was the most used one when I wrote this assignment. A page that appears on the first screen of results is more likely to be noticed than one buried several pages down, because people tend to choose from the first results they see.
Search results come from an index. Wikipedia's article on search engines explains that the index already lists the sites that contain a user's keywords, and that most of the work lies in generating and ranking the results page. No guarantee exists that any particular page will reach the top, so the practical goal is to make pages useful and easy to find.
What this means for translators and multilingual writers
Many translators work online and find clients online. For them, being easy to find in search is part of the business. A translator or a multilingual site can aim to appear in results in more than one language. The work of improving a site's visibility is called search engine optimization (SEO), and when it is done for several languages it is often called multilingual SEO.
Google's guidance on multilingual and multi-regional sites recommends giving each language version its own URL and linking the versions clearly, so that readers and search engines can find the right page. That fits my own view that a site should have good content for each language and should not rely on machine translation alone.
Visibility and social media
People who find a website through search may share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other platforms. That sharing can bring more readers and, in time, more clients. For this reason I treated search and social media as partners rather than separate efforts.
Advantages in my own language pair
I work with Portuguese and English. Searching in both languages gives me access to many ideas, authors, articles and blogs on a topic. This helps me build my own knowledge and become a better professional.
Key takeaways
- Visibility in search helps people find a website, but ranking cannot be guaranteed.
- Translators who work online benefit from being findable in the languages they offer.
- Each language version of a page should be clear, useful and linked properly.
- Search and social media can support each other.
Related reading: Modlingua's intern profile for Sachin Kumar (Portuguese-English) is at modlingua.com/interns/1014.
