If you have a successful website in English and are considering what to do next to drive traffic to your site, you may have considered translating your website into Chinese. Having a Chinese version of your website opens up your business to another 500 million Internet users. But, as someone who doesn’t know Chinese, how would you know how to translate your website? Here are five tips for choosing a reputable Chinese website translation agency.

1 – If they have bugs on their own website, remove them immediately! It’s almost unbelievable that people would even consider using a translation agency that can’t adequately translate their own promotional materials.

2 – Choose an agency that uses translators born and raised in China. It is always better to choose a translator who translates into your native language, otherwise the translation may end up reading as if it was written by a robot.

3 – Choose a website translation agency that has experience writing for the web, and that means writing sales copy. Over 90% of people who have their websites translated will sell something. This means that the goal of the translation agency should be to create Chinese text that sells. Anything less is interesting for academics, but not suitable for your business.

4 – Make sure they have a system to guarantee quality. Accredited agencies will have translations edited by a second translator and possibly even two additional translators. This ensures that they can produce accurate, high-quality translations in less time than an individual translator.

5 – Choose an agency that has experience with HTML, CSS and any other programming language your website is written in. They will need to be able to translate hidden text on pages, work with dynamic messages, reposition page elements, and deal with a host of other issues that the average translation agency has no experience with.