It is not uncommon for companies to have a web property or service that can’t be localized easily, for example because it is hosted on a monolingual CMS or static website or because it will be expensive to refactor the codebase behind the web service. The best solution is to migrate these properties over to a multilingual CMS such as Contentful, but these migration projects are often expensive and time consuming (and easy to put off).
Fortunately there is a good solution for clients who are in this situation, and that is to use a translation proxy server or a Javascript embed.
Translation Proxy Servers
Translation proxy servers function sort of like a CDN and site between the user and the web host. The proxy server “redraws” the page in the target language as it is served. The web host doesn’t need to know anything about the translations.
There are a number of companies that provide this type of service including Motion Point and Smartling.
One benefit of using this type of service with a TMS is that when you do migrate to a proper CMS, the translation memory will retain the translations. This means you won’t have to retranslate everything when you do the migration.
Javascript Embeds
Another approach that works is to use a Javascript embed such as LocalizeJS, Transifex OTA (Over The Air) or CrowdIn web translator. You simply paste a block of JS code in your page template, just like Google Analytics. It functions in a similar manner as a proxy server except it redraws the page within the user’s browser. This approach besides being simpler is also cheaper, whereas translation proxy servers are mostly marketed to multinational companies with an old tech stack.
Tradeoffs
The tradeoff of either approach is it can be a band aid fix for an upstream problem. One of the main downsides with these services is that search functionality is broken, which is especially an issue for help center or knowledge base content. Proxy server content can be crawled by search engines, so it will be visible via Google, etc, but not on internal search tools. Javascript embeds have similar limitations.
With that said, if you have limited engineering support to implement localization in code, or are stuck with your existing CMS, Help Center platform, etc, this is a lot cheaper and faster to implement.