Translation comes fourth: what to get right before you sell in a new market
When a business decides to sell in another country, the first budget line usually goes to translation. It's the visible move, the one you can put in a project plan and tick off by Friday. It also leaves everyone with the comfortable feeling that the market has been dealt with, when only the language has.
In the check-up I built for independent experts and small service businesses, translation sits fourth out of five steps. The three steps before it decide whether the translated site ever brings in a client.
Three jobs that get booked as one
Translating changes the language and keeps the meaning. Localising adapts the examples, references, prices and formats to the market. Writing for a market starts from what people there search for and expect, and the source text barely matters any more.
Most expansion budgets only ever pay for the first. The failure that follows is a quiet one: the site works, the pages are indexed, and the enquiries never turn up.
Distance has little to do with kilometres
My English is good. I grew up partly in the UK, lived there, and work in English every day. None of it helped the day I found myself researching drain-cleaning products for the Florida market, wondering with complete professional seriousness whether a chemical solution would cause unnecessary suffering to a snake lost in someone's pipes. My Western European upbringing had not prepared me for that one.
Speaking a language gives you its vocabulary. It doesn't tell you who carries authority in a market, which references people trust, or why they'd pick you over a provider who has been there for years. The people who come unstuck worst in a new market are rarely the ones who don't speak the language. More often, they speak it very well.
International business research calls the gap psychic distance, and looks at it along four axes: language, cultural reference points, how business gets done, and geography. Language misleads the most, because it feels like proximity. Geography still counts for more than most online businesses assume.
Where you land on those axes also tells you what will give way first. If most of them feel close, watch your wording and your site structure, because a shared language hides small, expensive gaps. If only the language feels close (the most common case, and the one people take hardest afterwards), your credibility goes first, since your references mean very little over there.
Does your offer exist there at all?
Expansion rarely starts with analysis. There's an enquiry from abroad, an opportunity, a hunch, and then someone briefs the translator.
The question that gets skipped in between is short and slightly dull: is what you sell, in the form you sell it, bought in that market by people who go looking for it? Search volume won't settle it. Three thousand monthly searches can be people trying to understand a topic rather than hire someone for it, or a need that belongs to a different profession locally. No amount of site work fixes a category that doesn't exist there in that shape. Forty minutes of looking is usually enough to form a view.
Your credibility stays at home
When you sell expertise, what makes you credible sits mostly outside your website: people who know you, publications that have quoted you, peers who would recommend you if someone asked. Your site crosses the border with you. That network stays behind.
Three yes-or-no questions make this measurable. Can you name three publications in the target market that have cited or published you? Three local organisations that mention you in the local language? Does your name come up when you ask an AI assistant about your category, from that country, in its language?
Three noes is the usual result, and a reasonable place to start from. The usual reaction is to publish more articles, which rarely moves anything: nobody else in that market is talking about you yet, and more of your own content won't change that. Credibility work is slow. First signs show after a few weeks, something measurable after four to nine months, and I'd be wary of anyone promising faster.
Then translation, with tested words
By this point translation has something to stand on, and the method shifts: you test words rather than convert them.
Take a freelance developer who translates « création de site sur mesure » as "custom website creation". The English is correct. Buyers in English-speaking markets tend to search for "custom web development", though, and "creation" leans towards design. Her technical service now reads like a design service, and the client who needed a developer scrolls past without recognising what they came for.
Checking this takes an afternoon at most. Search your three main service terms from the target country and see who comes up. Look at how three local providers label the same service in their navigation. Read a couple of local job ads for your profession, where nobody bothers with elegant phrasing. You may end up renaming how people find you without changing anything about what you offer, a change plenty of businesses resist because the two decisions feel like one.
Structure and AI visibility come after
Serving two markets from one site is a solved technical problem. Hreflang and similar declarations tell search engines which version belongs to whom. They don't build any local recognition, and a flawless setup on a site nobody in the market has heard of produces very little.
The last step is the newest one: checking what AI assistants say about you in that market, and whom they cite instead. Twenty-five minutes gives you a baseline, and it's worth re-running a month later.
The full check-up, in French, this autumn
The order above is the backbone of « Vends à l'étranger sans repartir de zéro », a French-language check-up I wrote for independent experts and small service businesses preparing to sell in a new market, francophone or English-speaking. Seventeen checks across six modules, about four hours, no paid tools. You finish with a clear map, your three priority workstreams and a 30-day checkpoint.
Until 6 October 2026, it is part of the Cabinet des Curiosités, the largest bundle of French-language digital products: over 100 guides, templates and tools from independent creators across France, Québec and beyond.
€180 for 12 products of your choice, or €220 for everything
Sales close on 6 October at 23:59 Québec time (05:59 on 7 October in France)
Buyers have until 6 December to unlock their products
Alongside the sale, the free Galerie des raccourcis runs 30 online sessions from 28 September to 2 October
Everything is in French. If you read French, work with francophone clients, or know someone planning a move, it's worth a look.
This is an affiliate link: I earn a commission on purchases made through it, at no extra cost to you.
The order is the strategy
Distance, offer, credibility, words, structure, visibility. Each check is modest on its own. The value is in the sequence: done in this order, each answer tells you what the next one is worth.
Translation still matters. It simply works best as the fourth move of a plan, rather than the first move of a hope.
