A translated website and a localised one are different products. The first converts words; the second makes a company legible to a buyer who did not grow up with its assumptions. For technical and regulated businesses the gap between them is commercially significant.
What literal translation breaks
Marketing copy translated word-for-word reads as foreign at best and unserious at worst. Claims that are ordinary in one market — superlatives, guarantees, comparative statements — can be unfamiliar or regulated in another.
Technical terminology is where the real damage occurs. A term rendered inconsistently across a product page, a datasheet and a regulatory submission creates doubt about whether the company understands its own product. In a regulated sector that doubt is expensive.
Terminology governance comes first
Agree a glossary before translation starts: product names, process terms, regulatory vocabulary, and anything that will appear in both marketing and technical documentation. Fix the decisions there and apply them everywhere.
Where a term genuinely has no clean equivalent, that should be flagged and decided deliberately, not resolved silently by whoever is translating that page. The wrong choice, applied consistently, is still wrong.
Traditional and Simplified are not interchangeable
Traditional Chinese for Taiwan and Hong Kong, Simplified for mainland China. Beyond the characters, vocabulary and technical conventions differ, and converting one to the other mechanically produces text that reads as though it was aimed at somewhere else.
For a company positioning itself in Taiwan, publishing converted Simplified text undercuts precisely the local commitment the site is meant to demonstrate.
The layout has to survive the language
Chinese text typically occupies less horizontal space than English, while German or Tamil may occupy considerably more. Navigation built to fit one language wraps, truncates or overflows in another.
Line height, font selection and character rendering all need attention — a font that looks correct in Latin script may render Chinese characters poorly or fall back to a system face that does not match the design.
Search behaves differently in each language
Buyers search in their own language using their own terminology, which is often not the direct translation of your English keywords. Keyword research has to be done natively rather than translated.
Technically, the site needs correct language attributes so search engines and screen readers know what they are reading. A site that declares itself English while serving Chinese content is handicapping itself for no reason.
Decide who owns it after launch
Localisation is not a project that finishes. Every new page, product and announcement needs the same treatment, and the most common failure is a second language that is complete at launch and six months stale a year later.
A half-maintained second language is worse than none: it signals that the market it addresses is not important enough to keep current.
The short version
Fix terminology before translating, use Traditional Chinese for Taiwan rather than converted text, build layout that tolerates length changes, research keywords natively, and decide who maintains it before launch.