Your 5-step guide to scaling websites internationally with the right API

Providing multilingual website content at scale is an essential element in growing your business internationally. With research from CSA showing that 72% of global consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language, effective translation is one of the biggest factors determining the size of your available market, and the revenue that global expansion can generate for you. 

Translation APIs are helping to lower the barriers to entry when it comes to businesses accessing new markets through their websites and apps. However, not all APIs are equally right for your business. To make a success of scaling your business internationally, it’s crucial to choose an API that fits your current strategy, delivers the right technical capabilities and can support your likely future needs as well. This involves looking beyond topline specs and pricing tiers, thinking about the role that translation will play, and planning the right infrastructure to deliver multilingual content efficiently, and effectively.

DeepL teamed up with our partner, Weglot, for an in-depth webinar exploring proven best practices for building multilingual websites and unlocking new markets through translation APIs. Here are the key insights from DeepL and Weglot’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Floran Pagliai. They add up to a five-step guide for finding the API for you, and building a strategy to leverage it effectively.

Step 1: Assess your translation requirements  

Before comparing APIs, it’s important to work out the volume and velocity of the translation workflow you’ll need to support. Calculating the total number of characters that appear on your website or application will give you a rough idea of the API consumption you’ll need and the costs involved. Bear in mind though, that you don’t necessarily need to translate the entire site, and you don’t necessarily need to translate everything at the same time. 

Some businesses pre-translate content, whereas others take an on-demand approach and only translate content when it’s requested in a different language. Both approaches have their pros and cons. On-demand translation offers flexibility but might introduce latency, while pre-translation ensures speed but requires more upfront work and data storage. The strategic choices you make help to inform the requirements you have for a translation API.

The formats that you need to translate are another important consideration. Are you just translating text or XML and HTML as well? Are you just translating website content and product listings, or do you need an API that can adjust to the style of customer service emails or marketing content? All of these considerations help to fill out the checklist of capabilities that you’re seeking.

Step 2: Find the right balance of language coverage and quality

In choosing a translation API, businesses must often balance the range of languages that are supported, with the quality and consistency of the translations for those languages. General-purpose LLMs often offer a wide range of languages but without the same depth and consistency as more specialized models when it comes to quality.

The trade-offs involved make it important to take a clear view of what languages you really need, and when you need them. An effective approach is to cross-reference your future expansion plans with the product roadmaps of potential API providers. Being clear about the timeframe for when you need to launch in different languages can broaden your choice of API provider, and give you better options when it comes to quality.

But it's not just the quality of the translations that counts. For organizations with limited developer resources, there’s value in prioritizing APIs with robust software development kits (SDKs), and clear documentation that can help to speed the implementation process. Those with larger technical teams could find greater value in choosing APIs with advanced customization features that those teams can make use of.

Step 3: Implement a caching strategy

Translating pages on demand, every time a site visitor from a particular country requests them, results in a lot of repetitive API calls and costs. It can also lead to websites taking longer to load while translations are generated. 

Organizations can manage the API workload and reduce latency by caching translations on a content delivery network (CDN) so that they can be reused quickly and easily whenever they’re needed. A caching approach reduces API requests and costs while also ensuring that pages are translated consistently whenever people access them. Caching works best for pages with relatively static content that doesn’t change too often. It’s also essential to take the costs of data storage into account, and ensure that the CDN you’re using meets all compliance and data security requirements. With the right approach though, it’s a valuable (and often overlooked) element in API strategy.

Step 4: Build on translation for effective localization

Translation may be an essential element in content localization, but it’s far from the entire task. Effective localization involves adapting content to resonate culturally and functionally in the market you’re interested in, addressing cultural nuances, contextual meanings, and regional formatting conventions, for example around measurements, currency, dates and times. If your intention is to localize content rather than just translating it, then you need an API that offers these capabilities as well.

Localization goes further in other respects too. It recognizes the importance of industry-specific and brand terminology, and ensures that particular terms are translated in a consistent way across languages. For effective localization, glossaries and other terminology management features are important API capabilities.

Step 5: Plan a translation infrastructure for scale

As organizations grow internationally, their translation needs evolve. A solution that works perfectly today may become a constraint tomorrow if it’s not chosen and implemented with scalability in mind. Look at your predictions for what your API usage is going to be over the next 12 months, and how much traffic you aim to be driving from each market. As you look at your growth strategy and roadmap, ask if your API is ready to support what you’re planning to achieve.

After all, the right translation API strategy doesn’t just translate words. It’s also about translating strategy into execution, and expansion plans into real international growth.

Want more detail on finding the right API for your business? Read our checklist for developers, here.