Content Translation
In one sentence
Rendering content from one language into another so that a different audience can actually read and act on it.
Analogy Mental model
Subtitles or dubbing. The same film, made accessible to an audience that does not share the original language.
In practice What you actually do
Machine translation plus a human editor is now a reasonable workflow for most commercial content, and translation alone is not. Declare the relationship with hreflang so the engine treats the versions as siblings rather than duplicates.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Running an entire site through a free translator produces the worst of both: expensive to read and unclear to search. The languages are not the hard part, the market is.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →