The Hidden Complexity of Global Websites

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Sandra: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Greyd Conversations. Today I am joined by Thibaud Guerin, Agency Partnerships Manager at Weglot, and we’re going to talk about global websites. Thibaud, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you.

Thibaud: Thank you very much for the invite, Sandra. Super happy to be here as well.

Sandra: Maybe before we start, would you mind telling us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and in case anybody listening today doesn’t know Weglot already, what Weglot does?

Thibaud: As you said, my name is Thibaud Guerin. I’m in charge of partnerships with agencies and freelancers at Weglot. And for those who don’t know what Weglot is, that’s an AI-powered website translation plugin, which gives a lot of importance on the quality of the translation and also on the brand voice of the website, while still taking into account SEO, which is super important right now. Weglot is currently supporting more than 110K websites around the world. We just celebrated our 10-year anniversary. And for those who usually attend WordCamps, you may already have seen us during events of this kind.

Sandra: Nice. Congratulations on the anniversary. I wasn’t aware of that. Ten years. Incredible.

Thibaud: Yeah.

Sandra: So translating – most companies initially think about international websites in a pretty straightforward way, like, okay, we have a website, we want to enter another market, so let’s just translate it. But usually, at the latest when you move beyond one or two languages, things can get a bit more complicated because suddenly there are questions around who actually owns the content, who approves translations, how the local teams work together with headquarters, how SEO still works across several markets, and how you keep dozens of pages or websites consistent. And you already mentioned it – increasingly, how do you make sure that your content gets discovered not just by Google but also by AI-powered search experiences? So this is what we’re going to discuss today. We want to discuss how global companies can build websites that are globally consistent, locally relevant, and operationally scalable. Maybe let’s start with some definitions at the beginning. Translating a website and localizing it – is this the same? Is there a difference? Can you explain that?

Thibaud: Yeah, sure. There is actually a difference. For the translation side of things, that’s the simple way to adapt a website. It’s basically just making a simple copy of the content that you already have on your original content and making it in another language. You don’t have anything to edit on the design, on the experience, on the colors of the website. It’s just a copy of the original content in another language. Whereas localization is a step further from translation because, beside the translation itself, you will also adapt the content to really target an audience, a country, a region, or even a city. You will actually make it more local. That’s why we call it localization – it’s just making it more local. Actually, you can have a lot of parameters you can adapt in order to be more local. Maybe we can talk about it later, but you have a lot of examples on the design, on the tone of voice, on the product or shop on an e-commerce website, or whatever. So that’s the main difference: translation is the simple way, and localization is adapting the content to a specific audience.

Sandra: So probably I can have a perfectly translated website, but if I do no localization at all, it might still feel foreign to a local customer. But at the same time, I could assume that localization could also increase the risk for inconsistencies across different pages, right?

Thibaud: Yeah, exactly. And actually, we notice on our user base that translation is already something very important for companies and their websites. We made some analysis, and thanks to another research – it’s called “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” – we saw that 65% of the users on websites prefer to get content in their own language, even if it’s poor quality. So just starting with a correct basis of good translation is enough to target a local audience. And even 40% of users on a website won’t actually buy any product if the website is not in their language at all. So this is super important to translate. Even if it’s not super high quality, it will still have a good impact on the website.

Sandra: Interesting. And maybe the result of this is like there’s some kind of shift between how do we translate our website to what content deserves to exist in each market. I think that leads us to one of the probably less glamorous but probably more important parts of international websites: who actually gets to decide all these kinds of questions? Who owns translation and/or localization? Is it global marketing? Is it the local teams? Is it product, IT, SEO teams? Maybe external parties are involved. I assume for some companies it’s pretty difficult to find that balance between centralized control and local autonomy. I don’t know how much insight you have into how the majority of your customer base handles this, but are there any best practices or also some logos that you can share in terms of who owns the translated or the local content?

Thibaud: That’s a very good question, and I think there is one answer for each kind of company. We know that it really depends on the industry, on the country targeted. But what we see is that generally the internationalization of a company is rather in the marketing team’s hands. This is the team who will actually discuss and analyze whether or not they have to go globally, and they will be the ones able to know where they have to start. Because if you are a French company, for instance, you can just think about translating into German, but maybe there is no market for you in Germany, so it doesn’t make sense. What we see is that the marketing team is kind of analyzing the market to know where to go. And then, when they use Weglot, when they know where to go, they can just translate their websites automatically with AI, setting up their brand voice and so on, to have a good quality of translation. What we see as well is that if they have the resources internally – so basically they have a team based in the targeted country – they can involve this team in order to review the automatic translation, just to fine-tune it, to make it more appealing for the audience. So it was basically reviewing what already exists. And you had a good point about the IT team. Weglot users are not always involving the IT team in the process because when you implement the plugin on a website, it will translate everything automatically, but it will also automatically add some very important things for multilingual SEO. So there are hreflang tags, all the technical things that you can’t really see, which are in the source code, in the HTML code of the website. And the IT team doesn’t have to be really involved in the process because it’s fully done automatically by the solution. So marketing team to know where to go, then local teams to fine-tune the strategy and the message. But yeah, that’s basically it for the governance.

Sandra: So basically like a hybrid solution between central control and local autonomy. I think it’s a good way, because what we often also see happening is that kind of nobody really owns it. And we had a similar discussion with Emma Young recently when we discussed AI search, which is also a topic that often needs different teams to contribute, and often there’s not one dedicated person who’s responsible and really owns it. Is this something that you’ve seen as well? And if yes, what are the typical operational consequences when nobody really is responsible for international content and translations?

Thibaud: Yes. Like any kind of project, when nobody owns the topic, well, nothing happens or nothing goes properly. So there is a need to know who will do what on this project. As I mentioned, it’s super important that marketing kind of monitors the whole strategy for the translation and later on for the localization. But it’s always nice to have someone from the local team involved in the process just to give their eye on the situation and to give more context to the project. So if the global headquarters’ marketing strategy is not really hitting the local audience or the local message they want to convey, that’s something I guess that will be mentioned by the local team. We have a very good example of that at Weglot because obviously we translate our content on the website, and we have the strategy of globalization to target foreign markets. We are a French company, based in France, but we have a lot of markets in North America. And we had some recommendations from people based in Canada, for instance, that there is this specific bill. It’s called Bill 96, and it recommends to companies based in Quebec to have their content both in English and in French because these are the official languages there. And we in France didn’t know about this bill, about this law. And these people based there had this contextualization, had these insights that we couldn’t get, or that we took time to find out in the headquarters. So they recommended us to write a blog post about this bill, which we’ve done, and it’s one of the most performing blog posts that we have had on our blog. So this is a good example of the marketing team working as a global strategy but needing to get some context to be really relevant for an audience abroad.

Sandra: That’s a really good example. And I assume there’s a lot of these kinds of things that if you just handle it globally at headquarters, you would miss out on because of either issues or also missed opportunities, because you just don’t have that deep of a local market knowledge. Interesting. You already mentioned a couple of things that are relevant on the technical side or also have an impact on SEO. One of the things that you mentioned when we were preparing this conversation was that multilingual websites have a very specific SEO challenge, which is simply translating the content doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve created a website that is also discoverable in another market. Could you maybe dive into a little bit about what the biggest SEO challenges are in terms of multilingual websites?

Thibaud: Yeah, sure. Basically, you have to think about multilingual SEO as a kind of distinct discipline of SEO. I know that the audience here will already work on their SEO, but there is also multilingual SEO, which is super important and which is different from global SEO, I would say. It’s based on some pillars that are recommended by Google and other search engines. These pillars are having hreflang tags set up within the HTML code of the website. These are basic tags that will kind of redirect the search engine bots from a version of the website in that language to another version of the language. And it’s very important because it also informs the bot that there is actually this or that language available on the website. So that’s the first pillar. Then you have the unique URLs per language. That’s what you can see on the website when you are browsing, for instance, on a German website. It will be mywebsite.com/de, for instance, or /es for Spanish, or whatever. So these subdirectories – or even subdomains or top-level domains as well – that you can use in order to make a unique version of the URL in the translated version of the website. Super important for multilingual SEO. And then there is not only the HTML content that will be translated, but also all the metadata that needs to be translated for multilingual SEO. So all the alt tags, all the meta – everything is actually translated within the HTML code of the website.

Sandra: So these are, I think, things that typically get forgotten when you do it manually, probably.

Thibaud: Yeah, exactly. These are super important. And you can spend a lot of time to set them up. Thinking about the hreflang tags, if you have to set them up on all pages for all languages, and to maintain them in the long term, that can be tricky things to do and super annoying things to do. So that’s something that with Weglot is automatically done when you implement the plugin on the website. You don’t have to take care of them on all pages and everything. It’s fully automated. These are very important. And sometimes we saw that companies do some kind of workarounds, like creating other websites or other pages in translated versions or in other languages. In the short term, that can be interesting to do because at the end of the day, indeed, they will have content available in Spanish, for instance. But as you can have some bad habits of SEO that can be striked by Google in generic SEO, you also have that in multilingual SEO. For instance, if you have two websites with the same content, just translated, Google’s SEO bots can consider it as duplicate content, even if it’s in another language.

Sandra: Didn’t actually know that.

Thibaud: That’s something that is not super known, but it can have a bad impact on the whole SEO juice of the website. If you want to get results, you have to lead the right way if you want to be compliant with requirements from search engines.

Sandra: Is there anything that you need to do differently in order to optimize it for AI search than it is for traditional search? Have there been any changes recently?

Thibaud: That’s a super interesting topic that we are currently tackling a lot at Weglot. We optimize our solution to be compliant for multilingual SEO, and we search how we can make the same thing for GEO – so basically LLM results. And we noted that it’s super important to also make this default for GEO as you could do on SEO. That’s something which is not super known currently, but that will become super important in the next months or even weeks, as fast as it goes. We even made a kind of study of it to analyze millions of citations across Google AI Overviews to analyze if actually having a translated website has a good impact on the visibility on LLMs. For the studies that we did, we found out that translated websites saw up to 327 visibility in AI Overviews if they are translated. So basically, it means that you have way more chance to be mentioned by ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, etc., if your website is actually translated. Because it’s as simple as the bots will have a question in Spanish, they will review first websites in Spanish to get the information because it will be easier for them to render the information to the LLM in Spanish. So if your website is actually available in Spanish, let’s say, you have more chance to be cited in the LLM results. To answer your question, it’s super important to keep multilingual GEO in mind in the current web market.

Sandra: Interesting. What about – I mean, in general, I think AI removes a lot of language barriers in general. On the one hand, I think AI systems need high-quality, relevant, and authoritative content to answer market-specific questions, but at the same time AI systems can also translate a lot on their own. So maybe coming back to the localization question we had right at the beginning: does AI make that less important because it can just translate anything, or does it make it even more important?

Thibaud: I would say that it makes it even more important, just for the reason I mentioned in the previous question. It’s not only about the visual web. It’s also about HTML content – the code that the user won’t always see, but that Google or other search engines will see. The goal is to render them the message that they want to have in all the possibilities that we can make. For any kind of languages. Even if AI will make the translation work easier for the users on the internet, it’s also important to have this source text in translation to be indexed in search engines but also in LLMs. AI translation will be improved thanks to these new GenAI solutions. But it will still be important to get – it will make maybe the work simpler and faster and more contextualized with the content of the website. But it’s still important to have this translated content on the website to be ranked in LLMs.

Sandra: I mean, having the translations on your own website probably gives you also a little bit more control on what exactly gets cited and how it gets cited, because you don’t risk that AI translates something in a different way than you would have done it if you have it on your own website. That’s probably – you have a little bit more control, right?

Thibaud: Yeah. That’s actually an interesting topic because indeed, if you are using, for instance, Google Chrome, you already have on some websites this native solution from Chrome to translate the content on the website you are browsing as a visitor. But that’s not the owner of the website that will have access to this monitoring of translation. So you, as a visitor, will actually see the content, but from Google translation. So it reduces the risk of getting bad content on a website rather than, in comparison, if you as a website owner have access to the translation that you display on your website, you have more keys and more opportunities to get the good message to convey to your audience.

Sandra: We’ll dive a little bit deeper in a second on how Weglot actually operates, but I do know that you also work a lot with or rely on AI translations. I think it’s out of the question that AI translations are improving every day, every minute. How good is the content that’s automatically translated at the moment already? Are we already at the point where 90% of AI-translated content can just be used as it is, or where are the limitations today?

Thibaud: The translations are obviously getting better and better thanks to AI and GenAI, and you also have something interesting, which is that you have more and more languages available on these AIs. At the beginning, for instance, you only had the most common European languages, and now you have more and more languages from all around the world. So GenAI is making the translation better in the quality itself of literal translation. But if we think a bit broader than just a literal translation – and that’s the thing we are currently implementing at Weglot – you can get more contextualization of the translation thanks to AI. You can say that you want a translation to stick to the informal tone of voice because you are selling products to teenagers based in North America, or whatever. So you can better fine-tune the translation automatically with this new tool, which is AI, rather than before, when you just had literal translation and then a human to review and adapt a bit and to contextualize the translation. Now this job can be done by AIs. So the quality is improving thanks to AI, and I think that’s a good thing. To give you a bit of an overview on the use of AI currently on the translation market, we see that most of our users – a big part of our users – are actually relying fully on AI translation. They only apply some edits when they consider it relevant. But in most cases, they will completely rely on automatic translation, and they still see some good figures in terms of traffic or conversion rates on their website. It’s a bit linked to what I said before – even if you have a translated website with poor-quality translation, which is not the case anymore because translation is getting better and better, it still has a good impact on the website.

Sandra: Okay. You’ve shared already quite a bit of what Weglot actually offers and how it works. Is there anything that we haven’t covered yet? I would be interested in general: how does Weglot work? Because I know a lot of those, let’s call them traditional translation plugins, where you just go into the backend, do everything manually, and then you have to do the posts, the pages, post types. Is this a thing with Weglot even, or does it just take the frontend, no matter how it’s built, and translate it automatically? How much of that is really automated?

Thibaud: All the implementation process is automatic, and all the first layer of translation is automatic. When you implement Weglot on a website, it will scan the whole content that you have on the HTML side of things, and it will offer a first layer of AI translations for the whole content. It doesn’t really matter if the content is rendered by a third-party plugin, a third-party app, if it’s a dynamic element, or if it’s from this or that builder or using this or that theme. It doesn’t really matter to our solution because we just take the HTML content and we make a copy of it in a translated version. So all the content, including dynamic elements, but also metadata that I mentioned before for the SEO question – everything will be translated and rendered on the translated version of the website. And then, for all these translations, you can edit everything manually on the Weglot dashboard, on our solution, which is currently improving a lot, as we’ll release a new version of Weglot in the coming days. But maybe we can talk about it later. That’s how it works on Weglot currently.

Sandra: That’s super interesting. I can assume that it’s particularly interesting to have all things translation-related in one central place, no matter, like you said, no matter if you use different plugins, builders, post type architecture. So you can basically have one place where everything is translated, and it doesn’t really matter how the backend is working and who has access to what there, right?

Thibaud: Exactly. We even recommend to involve all the teams that need to be involved in the translation or localization topic on the Weglot project, because we know that if you want to have a human eye to give contextualization, to play a bit with the localization, that’s always interesting to involve other people from other teams in the Weglot project. We see a lot of companies having their Weglot project translate their content and invite their local team or professional translators they’re already working with, or even inviting professional translators on the tool itself, because on Weglot you can also order some professional translations from a pool of partners we have in our tool. So you have this first AI translation, then you can involve anyone that can be relevant on the project. They can give a human eye on the content, and you can even invite people from outside of your company to make sure the translated content of your website is the quality that you wanted to have on it.

Sandra: That sounds cool. We’ve just discussed how AI translations become better and faster, and they also become cheaper. What do you think, how does this change the business case for entering smaller markets, for example? Because if AI makes it more economically viable for companies to localize markets that previously weren’t worth the effort.

Thibaud: It really depends on the strategy that you have behind it because indeed, that can be super easy to have a website, add 50 languages on it for all the world, and just wait for things to happen. But unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that. You have to get a real strategy beforehand to make sure the website is performing well. What we recommend is always to have a clear and clean original version of the content of the website and then to already monitor and analyze the traction that you can have in other countries or other regions. We always recommend to have English on the website because that’s kind of a universal language that most people around the world can understand. We already saw that if you’re a French company, for instance, adding English to your website – you can already analyze some traction in the Netherlands or in Germany or in Spain. And based on this data that you can have actually on Weglot, but also on Google Analytics, on Google Search Console, etc., you can get some information on where to go first. So if you have some traffic in the Netherlands, let’s translate your website into Dutch and then let’s give more effort there. To answer your question, you can go abroad with AI super simply, but you still need to get a clear strategy to make sure you will get results there. That’s what we recommend at Weglot.

Sandra: What’s your take on how this will look like in, I don’t know, let’s say five years? Do you think we will still even have language versions of websites, or will AI just use one version?

Thibaud: I would say that the question is even: in five years, will we have websites?

Sandra: Okay, yeah, we could even go there.

Thibaud: Because, as you know, for instance, on Google they just released during the summer the Google AI Overviews, and we see that some traffic on some websites is decreasing because people would look at these Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT presentation or Claude’s presentation, without going on the website. So that’s a challenge right now. It’s super hard to say, to have a clear view on how the web will be in the next years. But in my opinion, the web and all the LLMs and all the AIs will still be based on some content written somewhere. So you will always need to get some content somewhere accessible for the LLMs or any other tool that may occur in the next years. As I mentioned before, if your website is translated, you get more visibility in something that will still continue in the next years. So the best content you have for your company, the better it will be in the next few years. It’s a super interesting question because it’s super hard to know how it will look even in six months. Tough question. We will see.

Sandra: At this point we can agree that we’re already quite far away from that traditional or initial idea with which I started this conversation, on, like, let’s just translate the website and then we’re good. And the complexity even increases when it’s not just one website and five languages, but think about enterprises with probably hundreds of websites and dozens of markets they operate in. Let’s maybe take a look at the architecture of these kinds of big website systems. When a company really operates in many countries, is there a best practice, like have one global website with many languages, or is it better to have separate websites for different regions? Is there a general best practice?

Thibaud: That’s a good question as well, and there is no best practice fitting to all the contexts. I think it really depends on the maturity that you have as a company in different markets. If I pick, I don’t know, a startup with a small website and targeting globally, without needing to get very specific content on a specific market, that’s good to have already one website with multiple languages on it. But indeed, with your example, if you are a big corporation with thousands of employees around the world, with specific offices around the world, that would make sense to get some specific websites. You can have a website with top-level domains, for instance, like mywebsite.fr for the French office. That can make sense to have this to convey a different message because you already have a specific strategy for this market. But as I said before, it’s all about strategy and all about data to know if that makes sense to have specific content, a specific website, a specific marketing team for this region. You still have to make sure that the websites between themselves won’t compete with each other, to get always this vision of which is the main entity in this region. It’s all about strategy and maturity to know if it makes sense to have a specific website. It’s also depending a lot on the resources that you can and want to allow to this specific market, because if you have just one person in Japan, for instance, it would be hard for him or her to maintain the whole version of the website in Japanese and so on. So it really depends on the resources that you are able to allocate to this.

Sandra: And resources – and probably also a lot of that may just happen automatically depending on the way that the company is structured. For example, what we see a lot – we work a lot with franchises that often also operate internationally and have hundreds or even thousands of locations in different continents. And what we often see is that, for example, all the US locations are managed via one website that is WordPress-based and owned by this and that agency. But in Europe, for example, they are built on a completely different system because they also have a different agency in Europe. So the way the company is structured and organized probably also has a big impact on how international websites are dealt with. If there is even one global version – so probably if you have a company that controls a lot through the headquarters, it’s more likely to end up with one global website that then gets translated into different versions, rather than if you are more fragmented and probably have sub-organizations in each continent, and probably each of them has their own marketing team, their own agency, and they kind of work independently. So that probably also has a big impact.

Thibaud: Yeah, completely. Completely agree.

Sandra: There’s one thing that you said during our preparations for this episode that really stuck with me. You said something like multilingual websites should no longer just be seen as a translation project, but as a real growth strategy, in that translation is just one of several building blocks that enables companies to reach new markets. That being said, what does all this mean for agencies? If you were running an agency today, would you still be selling multilingual website development as a project, or what would the offer be? What is interesting these days as an offer from an agency to companies out there?

Thibaud: That’s an even more important topic right now, that there is, as you said, better quality of translation thanks to AI. Back in the days, some agencies could offer multilingual websites to maintain the structure, the architecture of the multilingual websites with a .net if you have some top-level domain, etc. And also for all the content that was maintained by the agency – maybe you have a blog, new blog posts that the agency has to translate and everything. Now it’s less the case because you have more automation around translation. Thanks to AI, thanks to tools like Weglot, now I believe that web agencies have to be more than just project delivery, but also a real partner of growth for their clients. If a client is coming to an agency, that’s because they want to grow more, to get more conversions, to get more visibility, and so on. That’s what the agency, in my opinion, has to deliver: better results, better visibility. In the context of translation, that means that they can localize a bit more the website. It means that they can suggest some content that can be translated, like the Bill 96 blog post that I mentioned before. I think that’s the switch that is currently happening for agencies to become more consulting companies, to get their clients to be successful abroad or in their own market by providing the right solution, the right processes, with always the quality in mind. That’s how the market is currently evolving.

Sandra: I can also see that, whether it’s an agency or a company itself, when we have a case like, okay, we’re successful in, I don’t know, Germany and the UK, and we do want to launch in five more markets next year – where do you actually start?

Thibaud: As I mentioned before, the first super important topic is the strategy behind it. Really monitor where I have traction. Maybe it doesn’t really make sense to continue in Germany, or maybe we have to go all in in Germany to be successful as a company. The company needs to use their existing data that they have to analyze this and to build a clear strategy based on that. Now we have a lot of tools allowing you to get this data and to analyze it, even if you have a lot of them. It’s thanks to AI as well – it’s easier and easier to monitor that. So first, know where to go. Then what we recommend as well is not to spend too much time on details for the whole website. We always recommend to use what we call the Pareto law, which is the 80/20 law.

Sandra: Exactly.

Thibaud: The idea behind it is just to – as you know, you have 80% of the traffic or conversion of the website coming from only 20% of the pages that you have on the website. So what we recommend is to really take care of this 20% of the website, which is very important for the company. It can be the homepage, the contact page, and in the context of an e-commerce store, let’s say the three bestseller products. The goal is to give a lot of importance to these pages, to review them manually, to do some A/B tests on the translation, to review a bit the keywords, because for multilingual SEO, maybe sometimes the literal translation of a word won’t have any impact on the SEO. So you have to tweak it a bit to find the right keywords to be successful in SEO in Germany, for instance. That’s what we suggest as well. Then when you have this very well-done content, that’s when you can start to think about a more localized approach. You will need to, for instance, maybe adapt the images of the product because we know that in some countries they like to have text on the images, and in some countries they don’t like text on images. So that’s where you can start to tweak a bit the images. You will always have to adapt, for instance, the currencies, the date format, these kinds of things. It’s much more in all these details. You can even adapt the color of the banner because it can convey a better message in this country or that country. So this is the process. I would say: get the strategy at first, then translate, then adapt the content that matters really for your website. Then you’ll be able to iterate if needed later on. And at the end, it’s not an end because it’s an ongoing topic that you can always optimize, but the goal is to always go into the deep optimization to get the most fine-tuned content for your audience.

Sandra: Okay. Interesting. Thank you. I suppose you’ve probably also seen a lot of multilingual projects that were like a complete mess. What are the typical mistakes that you often see that companies make over and over again?

Thibaud: Maybe the most common mistake will be to think that workarounds to build multilingual websites will work. What I mean by that is to just take your website and create another website in another language. That can seem to be easy to do. But for SEO purposes, as I mentioned before, it can generate some duplicate content, which will, by contrary, have a super bad impact on the SEO of both the original version of the website and the translated version of the website. So basically, all your business – and that’s basically the first mistake. Then the mistake that you can do as well is to think that it will be easy to maintain in the long term. It’s easy to actually take a website, translate it, and have a multilingual website, but if you are starting to do some changes on the homepage, to add some new blog posts, to add some new products on the e-commerce website, along the time, then you will still have to do it multiple times in the translated version. So it can really super fast become a nightmare to maintain. Those are the most common mistakes that people can have in their translation projects.

Sandra: Okay, thank you very much for sharing all this expertise with us. I think that’s actually a good place to start coming to an end. Before we do that, I’d be curious to learn about what Weglot is working on at the moment. You already mentioned a couple of things, and I think you have a bigger release coming up, right?

Thibaud: Yeah, exactly. As I mentioned before, we are currently releasing a new version of Weglot. Currently, it’s available on WordPress, and in the coming days it will be accessible to other technologies as well because it’s not only for WordPress, it’s for all kinds of technologies. The idea behind the new version of Weglot is to improve the quality of the translation. The way you will implement Weglot will be a bit different. It will still remain as a plugin that you will add on your website – as simple as that, as it was before. And before, when you implemented Weglot on the website, it scanned all the content that you have on the website, and it took, for instance, this paragraph and this title, this heading, and it made a literal translation of this paragraph and this heading, but there was not really consistency between the two. The goal for us was to get a better quality of translation. Now, when you implement Weglot – when the scan will be done of all your content – you will have what we call a brand voice, which is kind of a language model or a prompt that you will have about your website. It will understand what’s the purpose of the website, who you are targeting, how your audience is more likely to speak. So what tone of voice you have to use on the website. This is a prompt that you have to build all your translations around. All the translations will be compliant with this prompt, with these brand voice guidelines. That’s a brand voice that you can actually edit along the way. You can add some adjectives to say, okay, I want to speak naturally, or because I have a very technical website, I have to speak very technically, or these kinds of things. This is something you can build, and even in the long term you can adapt always to get a good branding or wording on the website. That’s for the translation quality, which is improving thanks to this new version of Weglot. Besides that, the whole UX of Weglot will be improved as well on the dashboard. For those who are already using Weglot, the visual editor will be even more usable, as the translation list – the two are working together, I would say. So all the UX will be improved to give you more access to even the deepest features. On my side, so for my scope, for agencies and freelancers, it will be even easier to maintain and to manage multiple projects, multiple clients, on a common account. You have an overview of all your clients at the same place, with some notifications, some access to delegating the billing to your clients – the whole workflow will be simpler. That’s what we currently provide on Weglot. The goal behind it, besides the translation of the contents, is to build kind of a fully optimized hub for global expansion, meaning that you will have some more stats about how you can optimize your global expansion. You will be able to translate not only web content, not HTML, but also images, videos, or PDFs, and even more in the future. We don’t talk about that already, but you will have even more features coming along the way. That’s the vision of Weglot currently: to really give access to companies to make success for their global expansion, and we will provide all the tools that we can to make this process easier and more efficient for all the companies. That’s what we are cooking currently.

Sandra: Wow, that sounds like a lot. Need to make sure to check out the new version if I haven’t already. Thank you even more for taking the time right before that launch to be in our Greyd Conversations episode today. I’ve learned a lot. I think the biggest takeaway, at least for me, is that going global or going international with websites is about much more than just translating it. So thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us today. It was a pleasure to have you.

Thibaud: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Sandra: Thank you very much.

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