Images and graphics play a critical role in how companies communicate with their online customers. A basic photo or banner can often provide more helpful info in less time than a long paragraph of text.
Localizing visual elements for global users can be difficult for 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 makes a website with a mix of languages, translating text but keeping important images in their original language. This can come across as amateur to international customers.
MotionPoint’s image translation method overcomes issues with other solutions, providing a smooth, localized user experience.
Here’s why image localization is so important, why it’s difficult, and how MotionPoint provides a superior approach.
The Value of Localizing Embedded Images
A website in multiple languages with images boosts user engagement, sales, and 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 Visual Content Translation
Detecting and compiling these images for translation is extremely 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
Some professional translation companies struggle to adapt complex images due to lack of technology and design skills, hindering effective localization.
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
- The system automatically queues images with translatable text for human translation.
- Your project’s dedicated linguists—who are experts in your industry and brand voice—translate the images’ text
- Our Multimedia Translation Team uses graphic design tools to change the original text to translated text. We make sure to keep the same font style, colors, and design elements. This helps maintain a consistent appearance.
- We review, upload, and publish localized images 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. Some vendors need your image files or specific tags for their technology to translate your images accurately.
MotionPoint’s fully turn-key proxy-based solution makes it easy to translate images on your website without any extra work on your part. 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. Save these phrases in your translation memory to reuse them without extra cost.
Our designers switch out pictures with matching text that has already been translated in your memory. They will use these translations to make the image better suited for your audience. 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. Companies often replace old hero images with new ones, using the same filenames for easy organization.
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 technology can recognize specific characteristics on images and know when new images require translation. This is true even if the new images have the same filename as images that have already been 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
