In November, the ITI’s Welsh regional group invited translators to an SEO workshop in Cardiff. SEO, short for “search engine optimisation ”, is rapidly becoming increasingly important for translators and can be a useful tool, as well as a value-adding offer for clients.

The workshop itself was held by David García Ruiz, a translator who offers mainly SEO-optimised translation and SEO transcreation and copywriting services. He introduced us to the topic by giving us an overview of the different factors which influence the ranking of web content by search engines before diving into the details of keyword research and SEO-optimised translation. Among many other things, he explained that the direct translation of a keyword is not necessarily a good choice for a keyword in the translated text since the use of keywords can vary widely from region to region and culture to culture. Instead, we should use the direct translation of the original keywords as an inspiration for keyword research that would then uncover the most frequently used, related keywords in our language. Occasionally, these may differ quite significantly from the original so the final text will have to be rephrased to make it as easy to find as possible – a fact that clients have to be made aware of.

In the end, we got to test our own creativity in phrasing keyword-optimised blurbs for car adverts and compare our own solutions with the creative ideas other participants had. All in all a great seminar about an increasingly important topic for translators.