Images and graphics play a critical role in how companies communicate with their online customers. Consider a simple promotional photo or website banner: they usually convey more useful information, in less time, than a paragraph of text might.
But transforming these important visual elements so they are relevant for global users can create significant challenges for global companies. Localizing photos and graphics that feature translatable content, such as headlines or promotional copy, requires fluency in technologies, languages and graphic design.
Most traditional translation vendors lack this unique expertise, and can’t translate these images. This results in a “mixed language” website experience in which the on-page text may be localized, but important images are not. This amateurish look is a big turn-off for international customers.
MotionPoint’s approach to image translation solves the challenges and shortcomings of other solutions, and ensures a seamless, localized UX.
Here’s why image localization is so important, why it’s difficult, and how MotionPoint provides a superior approach.
The Value of Localized Images
The immersive in-language UX of a fully localized website—including its translatable images—boosts engagement, conversions and brand trust in global markets.
Artfully designed images are often used to promote sales, special prices and new products. Translating this text is important for a seamless UX, and delivers valuable information that drives conversions, too.
The Challenge of Localizing Images
Detecting and compiling these images for translation is very hard, if not impossible, for most website translation vendors. This is because the task requires mature technologies that can:
- Accurately analyze all content on a website
- Automatically identify translatable images
- Transmit them to linguists and graphic designers for localization
Most vendors don’t have that kind of technology, and lack the ability or the graphic design expertise to localize these images, which are often visually complex.
By contrast, MotionPoint has the technology, tools and talent—and leads the industry in image translation.
How MotionPoint Localizes Images with Translatable Text
This is what MotionPoint’s image localize process looks like:
- Our content-detection technology crawls your website and identifies all images
- Images with translatable text are automatically queued for translation
- Your project’s dedicated linguists—who are experts in your industry and brand voice—translate the images’ text
- Our Multimedia Translation Team uses special graphic design tools to replace the original text with translated text, replicating the look and feel of the image with the same font style, colors and design elements
- Localized images are reviewed, uploaded and published on your translated website
This whole process, from beginning toe end, typically happens within about one business day.
Our Differentiators
What sets MotionPoint’s solution apart from alternative localization technologies?
Smart Technology
Only MotionPoint’s technology can detect all translatable online content, including images. Other vendors require you to send your images’ source files, or conduct complicated tagging and development tasks for their technology to detect your translatable images.
By contrast, MotionPoint’s fully turn-key proxy-based solution only requires your translatable images to be viewable on your origin website. Our technology identifies your translatable images, and our teams localize them with no effort required on your end.
Cost Savings
MotionPoint reduces costs by leveraging translation memory, a database that stores all your project’s translated content. Once stored in your translation memory, these localized phrases can be republished again and again at no additional cost.
When a translatable image contains text that matches previously translated phrases stored in your translation memory, the translations are instantly sent to our graphic designers, who then work to localize the image. This eliminates the cost associated with translating the image’s text. You only pay only for our team to localize the actual image file.
Image Detection
Many companies feature “hero” images on their homepages or other high-profile website sections that change frequently. Many companies upload completely new versions of these hero images with the same filenames as the images they are replacing.
The underdeveloped content-detection technologies of most translation vendors often define “new” images as images with unique filenames. They can’t recognize when a company overwrites an image with a new version with the same filename.
MotionPoint’s smart technology recognizes the special checksum “thumbprint” that all images have, and know when new images require translation—even when they have the same filename of images that we’ve already translated.
Optimization for SEO
MotionPoint also translates the alt-text of your images, using market-relevant localized SEO keywords. This provides additional signals to regional search engine crawlers, which can help improve organic traffic.
We can also advise you on the best practice of overlaying text atop images (instead of embedding text in the image files themselves). This can dramatically increase the impact of your site’s localized SEO, and reduce translation costs.
Conclusion
Localizing all website content, including images, is critical for providing your international customers a fully immersive online experience.
Only MotionPoint has the technology and expertise to localize your translatable images cost-effectively and efficiently to deliver the world-class localized user experience your global customers expect—and deserve.
Last updated on May 15, 2019
