Portland English Language Academy Website Translation and Localization

Portland English Language Academy is an English language school, located inside the Everest College Building in downtown Portland, Oregon. In 2010, PELA released a new version of its website with a new look and updated content. To support the overseas marketing efforts, PELA turned to Globalme to help localize the new website into eleven foreign languages. Unlike many other English programs, that only provide marginal information in foreign languages, PELA chose to translate their entire website so that the international students have a complete overview of the school’s services. Having only few pages localized to foreign languages rarely ever addresses the needs of students who look for detailed information about English programs, accommodations or visas. Offering the school website in different languages will give PELA website a major boost in global search engine rankings, help promote its brand overseas, and create a stronger connection with potential students.

Globalme translated, engineered and tested PELA’s website in 11 foreign languages. We have externalized the shared data such as dates and tuition which will help PELA easily maintain the updates easier. With the update to a single data file, all languages will display the new dates and fees in the desired format of the target language. Globalme also added subtitles to PELA's promotional video which provides a great overview of life in Portland and at PELA. Videos with foreign subtitles are a great alternative to costly foreign voiceover recordings. Foreign subtitles also provide the additional benefit of search engine indexing for the video content.

PELA wanted to take usability a step further and include the tuition information in users’ local currency. Using a currency exchange API, our engineers implemented a real time converter. Converter detects the user’s location and displays a second fee column in user’s currency. If the user’s location does not match any of the supported locations/currencies, the user is able to select the currency of their liking from the dropdown box which updates in real-time.

You can view the PELA website in 12 languages at http://www.portlandenglish.com