Contents8
In short
Translating everything at once is expensive, multiplies errors in every language and produces pages nobody reads.
The first articles to translate are those that already attract visitors from the country, lead to an offer and will still be true in a year.
An article is fixed before it goes out for translation: an error in the source ends up in every language.
A partly translated blog is a low-cost test of the market, before translating the rest of the website.
A company blog quickly reaches fifty or a hundred articles. Translating them all seems logical, and machine translation makes it possible in a few hours. The result is rarely what was expected: dozens of pages with no readers in the new language, outdated news articles published as new, and an error in the original version copied into every language.
Translating a blog starts with choosing. This article gives the criteria, from the point of view of the company that publishes. It extends our articles on website translation.
Why not translate everything at once
Every translated article needs upkeep. One article in three languages means three pages to update when a figure changes, three pages to monitor, three URLs to redirect if the article goes. The cost of a language does not stop at the first pass, as detailed in website translation cost: per word, per page, per market.
Google looks at what the translation adds. Among its examples of scaled content abuse, its spam policies cite reusing feeds, search results or other content to generate many pages that add little for the reader, including through automated transformations such as translation. A blog translated in bulk, without review or adaptation, looks like what these policies describe. An article translated, reviewed and adapted for the country’s reader does not.
Not every article travels. An article on a national regulation, a local event or last year’s news does not interest a reader in another country. Translating it costs as much as any other, for nothing.
Criteria for choosing the first articles
An article deserves an early translation when it ticks several of these boxes.
It already attracts visitors from the country. The Search Console performance report can be grouped by country: articles that already receive impressions and clicks from abroad, in your language, show demand even before translation.
It leads to an offer. An article that answers a question asked just before buying, and links to a page that sells, brings in more than a general-interest article. The offer page then needs to exist in the language, or the reader stops there.
It will still be true in a year. Guides, methods and maintained comparisons travel well; news rarely does.
People search for it in the target language. The topic must match real searches in the country, with the words people there use. The research is redone, not translated: see keywords abroad: redo the research, don’t translate it. An article can even change its title and angle from one language to another.
It is up to date. An article that needs fixing goes through the fix first, then translation.
- List the articles
With their visits and impressions by country, over twelve months.
- Set aside what does not travel
Dated news, topics specific to your country, articles you would not publish again today.
- Rank the rest
Demand from the country, link to a translated offer, lifespan of the topic.
- Fix the ones you keep
In the source language: figures, links, sources.
- Translate in batches of five to ten
With review, then measure before the next batch.
Fix before you translate
An error in the source article goes out in every language, and is then fixed in every language.
Watch out
A translated error is fixed as many times as there are languages
A client learned this the hard way: on Palmora Property, rental yields stated at 8 to 12% had to be brought down to around 5.8%, a figure sourced from Colliers, in six articles published in five languages. Thirty pages to rework instead of six.
Reviewing an old article before translating it checks the figures and their sources, the internal links and the screenshots. It is also a chance to update it for the original language, which gains as much from it as the new one. Only then does the article go out for translation, with the brand glossary that fixes the company’s terms.
The blog as a test of a new market
Translating a few well-chosen articles costs far less than translating the whole website, and already tells you whether the language attracts readers.
From the field
On Palmora Property, a six-language real-estate listings site we operate, German was opened with the blog alone first: 1,092 content keys in parity with the other languages, 24 articles, 2,009 URLs, a low-cost test of demand before translating the rest. Conversely, this site closed two languages in July 2026: sixteen months of Search Console data counted 15 clicks for Spanish and none for Chinese.
The test needs a criterion set in advance: a number of visits from the country, contact requests or sign-ups over a given period. If it is reached, you translate the pages that sell; if not, you keep or remove the articles, without having paid for the rest. Choosing the language itself is prepared with which European market to open first and opening an English-speaking market and, further afield, selling in China or Southeast Asia.
Translating an article also means translating what surrounds it
A translated article is not limited to its text.
- The title and description are rewritten with the language’s keywords, not word for word.
- The URL takes words from the language, and is decided before the blog grows: on Palmora Property, English articles kept French URLs, a debt that became too costly to fix.
- Internal links only point to pages that exist in the language; a link to an untranslated page sends the reader to a language they do not read.
- Hreflang tags link the article to its other versions, as set out in our guide to hreflang tags.
- Images with text, tables and quotes are translated or replaced.
Approved sentences go into the translation memory: when the article changes, only the changed sentences go back out. The split between machine translation and review follows the rule for the whole website, detailed in automatic or reviewed translation: an article that sells is reviewed in full, and the quality of the others is tracked on a sample, following measuring translation quality. The tool is chosen on your own articles, with the method in DeepL, Google or an LLM; a blog generally contains no personal data, but the comments and forms that come with it fall under translation and GDPR.
After the articles
A reader won over by a translated article then goes further: offer page, form, confirmation email, support reply. Each must greet them in their language, with their country’s prices and formats: that is the subject of localize, don’t just translate and translating customer support emails. A blog that presents products leads to product pages translated as in translating product pages for export, a software publisher to an app translated as in translating software. Terms of sale and the privacy policy follow their own rules: translating a contract with AI.
Where to start
Export from Search Console your blog pages with their clicks and impressions by country over twelve months, and keep the ten articles with the most visits from the target country, among those that lead to an offer and will still be true in a year. Fix them, translate them, review them, and set the criterion that will tell you, in three months, whether the language deserves more.
To choose your first articles and set up their translation, send us your blog’s address and the target language: we start from your search data.
Frequently asked questions
Should you translate every article on your blog?
No. Dated news articles, articles specific to your country or ones you would not publish again today add nothing for a foreign reader. Translate first those that already attract visitors from the country, lead to an offer and stay true over time. The rest follows if the language proves itself.
Does Google penalise a machine-translated blog?
Its rules do not target translation as such. Its spam policies target content produced at scale with no value for the reader, and cite automated translation among the transformations used for that. An article that is translated, reviewed and adapted to the country’s searches adds value; a blog translated in one go without review, much less.
How many articles should you translate to test a market?
Enough to cover the topics that lead to your offers, and for the criterion set in advance to mean something: a first batch of ten to twenty well-chosen articles gives a first measure. On Palmora Property, German was opened with 24 articles before the rest of the website.
Should a translated article keep the same URL?
No: each language has its own URL, with words from the language, and the article is linked to its other versions by hreflang tags. Decide this before the blog grows, because changing a URL that is already indexed requires a redirect and a check, article by article and language by language.
Sources
- Google Search Central, spam policies (new tab)developers.google.com
- Search Console Help, performance report (new tab)support.google.com
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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