Another spreadsheet of the whole site
A client's marketing team updates their website most weeks. Every so often, they export the whole site to a spreadsheet, send it to you and ask for the new bits in French and German. Your PM runs the analysis. Most of it matches the TM, which is good for the price, but the PM still has to find the genuinely new content, check the spreadsheet has not scrambled any HTML, and then send it back for the client's developer to paste into the CMS.
The developer pastes some of it into the wrong fields. A button label overflows. A page goes live in German with one English paragraph in the middle.
Why website translation keeps starting over
- Clients cannot easily see what changed, so they send everything.
- Exports to spreadsheets lose structure and break markup.
- Returning translations depends on someone pasting them in correctly.
- Small changes, such as a new product description, are held back until there are enough to batch.
- Nobody sees the live foreign-language pages until something looks wrong.
What it costs
PM and client time handling full exports for small changes. Errors on the live site from manual pasting. Foreign-language pages that lag behind the main site, sometimes for weeks. A client relationship that feels like hard work for both sides. And lost work, because a client that finds the process painful will look at a plugin that promises automatic translation.
| Step | Export and paste | Connector |
|---|---|---|
| Finding changes | Whole site exported | New and changed content detected |
| Sending to you | Spreadsheet by email | Strings sent to your CAT tool or TMS |
| Keeping structure | Markup broken in spreadsheets | Structure preserved as tags |
| Returning | Pasted by a developer | Pushed back to the right fields |
| Checking | After it goes live | Preview before publish |
How we build the website connector
- We connect to the client's CMS through its API or a plugin: WordPress with a multilingual plugin such as WPML or Polylang, Shopify's translation API, or headless CMSs such as Contentful or Sanity.
- New and changed content is detected on a schedule or when pages are published, and grouped into a job with a word count against the client's TM.
- Content is sent to your CAT tool or TMS, such as Phrase, XTM or memoQ, in a format that keeps markup as tags translators cannot break.
- The client approves the job in their portal, or it is approved automatically under an agreed threshold.
- Completed translations are pushed back into the right language version of each page, as drafts or published, as the client chooses.
- The client and your PM can preview translated pages before they go live, and length problems in buttons or menus are flagged.
Some CAT tools and TMS platforms already offer connectors for common CMSs. We check those first, and build only where the client's CMS or workflow needs something they do not cover.
What changes
We also deal with the content that is not on a page: menu labels, form messages, email templates, product attributes and alt text for images. These are often missed in spreadsheet exports and then show up in English on an otherwise translated site. A connector reads them from the same CMS, so they are part of the job like everything else.
Clients publish in their main language and new content flows to you automatically, in small, regular jobs. Translators work in their CAT tool with markup protected. Translations appear in the right place without anyone pasting. Foreign-language pages stay close to the main site. And the client relationship becomes easier to keep, because translation has stopped being a chore for them.
Is this your website work?
- Clients send whole-site exports for small changes.
- Translations are pasted into the CMS by hand.
- Markup breaks in spreadsheets.
- Foreign-language pages lag behind the main site.
- Clients have asked about automatic translation plugins.