BUSINESS

There are two types of people in the professional world: those who see the whole picture and the end goal and those who collect the puzzle pieces to put them together. What a joy it is that my husband, Sotir Rangelov, and I represent both types. It’s the perfect combination: We simply act, with him supplying the dreams and me, the voice of reason.

How does that work in practice? Let’s examine that question through the lens of our top-priority service: specialized website translation. Perhaps we can illustrate how complementary traits like ours can make a business thrive in a small market.

An idea born in crisis

The year is 2020. COVID-19 ravages the world and disrupts lives. Lockdowns interrupt work and life. People are terrified, and business is almost at a standstill. In this crisis, when all we could do was stay at home, we refused to be idle. This was the perfect time to develop Sotir’s idea for a service that would help businesses expand their operations and reach foreign markets quickly and affordably. Of course, website translation is not a service we invented. Still, how we perform and offer it is innovative for Bulgaria and combines the skills of linguists and IT specialists, saving entrepreneurs headaches, time, and money.

As a pilot, during the COVID-19 crisis, Oltrans Translation Agency offered the service without profit so that as many businesses as possible could benefit from it. This allowed us to develop it further and adapt it to the needs of different customers.

Solving 4 great problems

In the two intervening years we offered the specialized website translation service, we identified our clients’ four main problems.

1. I don’t know the text volume on my website or how much to budget for the translation.
   Entrepreneurs must understand the significance of this insight, which can affect their overall marketing position in the international market. That’s why we provide an accurate quote before starting a project.
2. The text volume on my website is greater than I imagined.
   This leads to an unexpected translation budget for the client and concerns about whether the implementation will fit the set deadlines. That’s why we offer different solutions for website translation. The free consultations with the clients clarify the purpose of their translation, the market they want to reach, their budget, the scope of the translation, and the launch period.
3. Linguistic terms are crucial as they represent the face of our brand and help customers recognize us.
   Customers realize that specific terms are the key to brand recognition and are the foundation of good advertising. This topic is very sensitive; therefore, the solution is compiling a termbase and ensuring that translators and editors strictly adhere to it. And the translators’ job is to embed the specified translation of the terms in all SEO elements.
4. My website’s appearance is of the utmost importance. I want to avoid misaligned text or text that goes outside of buttons.
   The solution is simple: in-context review. There is also a fifth problem, albeit one more for IT developers, and that is the waste of time when exporting text from the website and importing the translation. The specialized method of Oltrans for website translation successfully and efficiently solves this problem for WordPress developers by automating it. This makes this method the preferred choice of customers and developers who use WordPress, the most popular platform.

Challenges faced in promoting the service

The hardest part for us was educating business owners that website translation differs greatly from any other translation. The texts on the website are primarily marketing but are also strictly specialized depending on the company’s business activity. We have translated websites from the energy industry, medical devices, pharmacy, cosmetics, nutritional supplements, the food industry, interior design, photography, transport vehicles, telecommunication services, and many more. Selecting the right team of a translator and an editor is always the most important step.

It proved challenging to convince clients that relying on a professional, complex website translation service would solve many of their problems. Clients who had bitter experiences with missed deadlines, a volume that ended up being much larger than originally agreed, broken design after importing the translation, literal translation, and translation errors reported by foreign clients came to us. Some entrepreneurs believe they can face these problems once they happen to them, and then it turns out that they have spent much more money than originally planned.

We also often encounter the prejudice that the website is not ready to be translated. This is a somewhat limiting perception that keeps our clients away from launching international sales. In these cases, we advise them that they can start with the basic pages of their website and that this is enough to test whether their desired market will be worth further investment.

On the threshold of something new

The obstacles, difficulties, and challenges we faced in promoting this service in Bulgaria led us to Sotir’s new dream — to provide the service to foreign customers. Our service is ready to leave its homeland in Bulgaria and solve the problems of business entrepreneurs worldwide. It is the perfect solution for owners of websites built on WordPress (although not just that platform). What makes it unique is that it covers all every stage in the complex process of international, online marketing: text, marketing, SEO, design, and technical implementation.