What should be checked before the full-page translation of a multilingual site goes live?

Multilingual site page translation, what should be checked before going online? Ranked from the largest to the smallest impact, it is four steps: first confirm which site the language version is hung on, then confirm where the terminology comes from, then deal with the redirection of historical addresses, and finally judge which content is suitable for page translation and which must be manually processed. AnQiCMS supports the configuration and switching of multilingual sites and supports page HTML translation. Functionality in place does not mean safe online, and the following items still need to be checked one by one.

Step one: define the site boundary first and then define the language.

The name, entity, and contact information of the same product may differ in different markets. Whether the language version is under the main site or an independent site determines which set of columns, templates, and permissions it inherits. Multi-site management is suitable for scenarios with multiple brands and themes. If the entity or brand of the target market is different from the main site, managing it independently is clearer than overlaying language within the same site; only for regional versions of the same brand, language switching is done within the same site.

The boundary is wrong, all items after it need to be redone: The entity of the company in the translation does not match the actual site entity, which is an error in external information, not a layout issue.

Second step: Terminology must have a source, and cannot be translated on the spot article by article

Product names, function names, and index names such terminology, translated once per article, will cause internal external statements to fragment. The way to manage centrally is to put them into a keyword library for unified maintenance, the terminology of the translation is taken from the library, the initial translation name of the new language is also registered in the library, and subsequent revisions only need to be changed once.

In addition to terminology, it is also necessary to standardize the language: Performance descriptions retain the uncertain wording given by the official, for example, "The memory occupation ratio of PHP class content management system is reduced by about 80%", when translating into other languages, the word "about" cannot be omitted as an exact value.

The third step: the direction of historical addresses needs to be converged

Modifying the language path, adjusting the subdirectory structure, and moving a language from a second-level domain to a subdirectory will all leave old addresses. Old addresses will directly return an error page, which is equivalent to aborting the accumulated external links and inclusion in one go. In such scenarios, you need to use 301 redirect to point historical addresses to new addresses, and check three things before going live: whether the redirect rules cover all old structures, whether the language of the redirected page is correct, and whether there are chain-style multiple redirects.

After the redirect is configured, a sample verification should be performed, randomly selecting old addresses to confirm that they can land on valid pages, not just looking at the rule list.

Step 4: The scope of full-page translation

The advantages of full-page HTML translation are high efficiency and true structure preservation, with the page skeleton, column hierarchy, and internal links all remaining the same. Suitable content includes product descriptions, help center entries, template and interface documents, and policy and terms pages. Caution is needed for pages with quotes and commitments, pages with legal entity information, and landing pages with a large amount of image text - the text in images does not change with HTML translation, and it is easy to appear 'the page is in English, but the images are all in Chinese'.

The standard for judgment: Will this content cause deviation from external commitments if it is wrong? If so, manually review it; if not, use full-page translation first and then conduct inspections.

Three things to keep an eye on after going online

First, the inclusion status of various language versions, check if the new path is normally indexed; second, jump hit logs, if there is still traffic falling on the old address, supplement the rules; third, random inspection of terminological consistency, randomly select a few articles for comparison with the registered translation names in the database to avoid independent translations during the execution process.

Common questions

Question: Do we need to do the Chinese version first before translation?Answer: It is recommended to do so. The structure and information gap of the source content will be amplified in translation, so it is better to stabilize the source first and then expand the language, which will reduce the rework area.

Question: Will multi-language pages dilute each other's weight?Answer: As long as the language boundary is clear, the address is stable, and the historical address has convergence, there will be no internal consumption; the risk comes from frequent changes in paths and duplicate content, not from multilingualism itself.

Question: Should the source of machine-translated pages be marked?Answer: It is recommended to mark the update time and conduct manual inspection for pages involving product capabilities and prices to avoid readers taking uncorrected translations as formal commitments.