What would be the best way to translate my website for international seo?

[Shawn124]

I am planning on creating a multi language website that targets different countries and would like to know what would be the best way to translate my content from English to multiple different languages (French, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, etc.). I would hire a translator but doing so for all these different languages would be too costly. Using Google translate will leave me with at best a rough translation.

What are my other options? Is there a website that can provide me a better translation? Would Fiver be a better/cheaper alternative?

Thoughts?

[David_ODonnell]

To put it simply, the more (decent) content you have, the more opportunites you have to rank for keywords in search.

[Shawn124]

I want good returns but am having trouble finding a good place to source translators. Any recommendations?

[Shawn124]

Thanks I'll check out Odesk and see how much it will cost to do a translation.

Would translating a partial part of the website to another language negatively affect the international rankings for it? For example, if I only have 3 pages translated for mywebsite.com/fr when mywebsite.com has 100s of pages would my ranking be lower on the Google France SERP?

[David_ODonnell]

My opinion, if you're going to do it, do it properly.

I've had great and affordable results hiring translators on Odesk. Get them to do a sample and have another, or multiple native speakers review it. If you can't afford to translate an entire site, consider just doing a mini version of the site or just core pages in another language.

[mememax]

In my experience I'll go google translate for a fast and cheap start. After the soft launch you can start hiring translators for the best performing websites and when they'll start giving you revenue they'll be paying their translation themselves. I won't rely on low cost services since they won't be providing that quality translations which in these panda days is required, remember that if a user sees grammar errors they'll be more susceptible of bouncing back to serp and this may be negatiely affecting your rankings in the long term too. If you want a good return you'll ahve to spend a bit.