Once one or two enquiries arrive from abroad, “should the site be in English too?” follows naturally. Translation is cheap now, so the answer is usually yes. There is one distinction worth understanding first, though, because without it you get a different result from the one you expected.
Translation does two different jobs
Usability and search visibility are separate problems. Usability means someone who already reached your site can read it. Search visibility means someone searching in that language can find you. Depending on how you translate, you get one of those or both.
A widget that translates in the browser changes the text on the visitor’s screen only. The HTML the server sent still contains the original language, so when a search engine fetches the page it does not see a document in another language. That is where “we made an English page but it never shows up in English search” comes from. The widget is not broken — it was never the tool for that job.
For visibility, the address has to carry the language
For a search engine to treat language versions separately, each language needs its own address. Subdirectory or parameter, the format hardly matters; what matters is that opening that address makes the server return text in that language.
And do not put the language in a cookie or session. If one address serves different languages to different people, crawlers only ever see one of them — and on a page-cached site, whichever language was cached first gets served to everyone else. The language belongs in the URL.
How much to hand to AI
In practice, AI for the first pass and a human for the final read is the sensible split. Machine translation is now comfortably natural at explanatory-prose level and far quicker than translating from scratch.
Some things, though, must not simply be left as translated.
Price is the clearest case. Converting a figure at today’s rate makes your displayed price move with the exchange rate, and conventions about tax-inclusive pricing differ by country. That is a policy question rather than a translation question, so a person has to settle it. We keep our own won and dollar prices as separate fixed figures rather than converting between them.
A realistic order of work
You do not need the whole site in two languages on day one. Authoring translations for the screens conversion depends on — home, service, pricing, contact — and letting machine translation cover the rest gives the best return. When you do that, it matters that screens without a real translation stay out of the index. A search result leading to a page the reader cannot read adds impressions and subtracts trust.
Multilingual structure and search visibility are covered across the AI and SEO archives, and restructuring a site with languages in mind is part of our optimization program.