FoodSmart is an online food safety program developed by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and designed specifically for Class 2 retail and food service businesses in Victoria. This program creates a customised food safety program for businesses through a series of screening questions about their food handling processes.
DHHS values accessible information and strives to reach more communities through their tailored programs. Therefore, DHHS partnered with LanguageLoop, Australia’s leading language service provider, to translate the full online program into three different languages; simplified Chinese, Vietnamese and Arabic.
Translating website content can be extremely challenging and requires thorough preparation before starting the translation process. LanguageLoop’s Translation Team worked closely with DHHS’s third party technology contractor, Webplace, at each stage of the project to localise the user experience in all three target languages in a culturally appropriate way.
Before starting the translation process, reviewing the source content with your language service provider is crucial as it will minimise issues down the track. For this particular project, our expert translators were engaged to translate the entire website—consisting of 45,000 words and 42 downloadable files—in just three weeks. We then conducted in-context reviews and user acceptance testing to optimise localisation and ensure consistent terminology and style across all three languages.
Myriam Khalil, LanguageLoop’s Senior Translations Project Coordinator said there are many considerations businesses need to take into account when planning to translate their website.
“It’s important to involve the language service provider in the project as early as possible to maximise the localisation experience and advise on best practice,” Myriam said.
“For example, during this project we worked extensively with the web team to ensure user interface elements such as buttons and drop down lists were adjustable as some languages can expand these elements up to 30% more than English—these small details can significantly affect the website layout and user experience.”
“Another aspect often overlooked in the translation process is the copy placement. For example, in this project we had to consider how to position the Arabic text on the website as this language is read from right to left,” Myriam added.
Samantha Chan, Senior Digital Project Manager for DHHS’s web contractor said it was a pleasure working with LanguageLoop’s Translations Team.
“This is our second project with LanguageLoop. Myriam Khalil and her team of translators are great to work with. They are always on top of everything,” Samantha said.
“I would definitely work with Myriam again and would highly recommend LanguageLoop’s translation services.”
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