Your site in several languages without the mess: hreflang for musicians
If you play abroad, your site should speak the language of whoever books you. How a multilingual site is organised and what Google understands.
By Joan Subirats, founder of The Jazz Passport7 min read
In this article
A programmer in Lyon opens your site. So does someone from a festival in Porto, and the person who books a club in Berlin. All three get by in English. All three read faster in their own language, and trust what they read more.
If you play outside your own country, your site is read by people like them. Writing it in several languages is the same courtesy as writing a booking email in the language of the person who will receive it. For a touring musician, it is part of the job.
Doing it well holds few mysteries. There are a couple of technical points worth understanding, and several ways to make a mess of it.
Which languages, and how many
Start from where you play, or want to play, rather than from a long list. If you work abroad, English is usually the logical second language, because it is what professionals from different countries use with each other. After that, add the language of each market where you already have contacts or dates.
Every language you add is one more to keep up. Picture a French version with a bio three years out of date and a tour that already happened. It looks worse than having no French version at all. Two languages kept current beat five half done.
One address per language
A multilingual site rests on one rule: each language lives at its own address. The site in your language can sit at the root, yourdomain.com, and the English version at yourdomain.com/en. That gives you three things:
- You can send the right link. The Portuguese festival gets the Portuguese version and never has to hunt for the switch.
- Search engines see every version. If the page changes language while the address stays the same, a search engine indexes only one of them.
- Visitors decide. With a language switch visible on every page, each person reads in the language they prefer.
Don't send people to another language automatically, based on their country or their browser, without a way back. A German programmer may keep their browser in English. Someone on the road may be opening your site from a country that isn't theirs. Suggest a language if you like, and leave the choice to them.
What hreflang is
When the same page exists in several languages, a search engine has to know they are versions of one thing. Otherwise it treats them as separate pages competing with each other. hreflang tells it. It is a few lines in the head of each page, invisible to visitors, that say “this page also exists in English at this address, and in French at that one”. They look like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://yourtrio.example/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yourtrio.example/en" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://yourtrio.example/fr" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yourtrio.example/" />
Three details often go wrong. First, each version must list all the others and itself. If the English page points to the Spanish one and the Spanish page doesn't point back, the search engine may ignore both. Second, the codes name languages (es, en, fr). Country codes only come in when you have separate versions for countries that share a language. Third, x-default says which version to show someone who speaks none of your languages. Usually that is the main one.
With that in place, a search engine can show each person the version in their language. It weighs the hint along with everything else, so nothing is guaranteed. Without it, though, someone searching in French will most likely land on your page in Spanish.
Say it the way they would
A good version in another language says the same thing the way someone from there would say it. Some things get translated, some get adapted, and some stay as they are.
What to adapt, not just translate
- Dates: 14/11 in Europe is 11/14 in the United States; write the month as a word and the doubt goes away
- Times: 21:00 in one place, 9 pm in another
- City names that change with the language: London, Londres; Geneva, Genève
- Instruments: the double bass is contrabajo in Spanish and contrebasse in French
- Press quotes: keep the original and add the translation next to it
- The title and description search engines show, which need translating too
Some things stay as they are: venue names, record and song titles, and the band's name. A festival looking for you will search for “Your Trio”, exactly as you wrote it.
Have someone who speaks the language natively read your bio. You don't need a professional translator for every line. You do need someone who can tell you whether it sounds natural. If you are writing your bio from scratch, the bio guide explains which versions are worth having.
What not to do
Better
- Each language at its own address
- A visible switch with each language’s name
- First what a programmer reads: bio, dates, contact
- A native speaker reviews what a machine translated
- Going over translations when you change the original
Better avoided
- Machine translation published unread
- Two languages mixed on one page
- Flags to pick a language, as if each language were a country
- Half the site translated and the other half not
- Redirecting by country with no way back
Machine translation makes a good first draft and a poor final text. It gets proper names wrong, translates titles it should leave alone, and doesn't know the slang of the trade. Let it save you time, then read every line.
A page that mixes languages confuses everyone. The visitor can't tell which version they are on, and the search engine can't tell which language to file it under. If a text is still untranslated, show it whole in the original rather than as a half-finished translation. Keep that the exception, and fix it soon.
Setting it up, step by step
- Choose the second language by where you play or want to play.
- Translate what a programmer reads first: the short bio, dates, contact, and the site's title and description.
- Ask a native speaker to read it and mark anything that doesn't sound natural.
- Check that each language has its own address and that the switch takes you to the same page in the other language.
- Whenever you change something in the original, note what the translations need to catch up on.
In Pages
Besides its own language, a Pages site can have as many as you need. The choice is English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Each language gets its own address, with hreflang linking every version and all of them in the sitemap, and you don't write any of it. AI drafts the translation and you review it. When you change the original, Studio marks which texts need going over in each language. Anything not yet translated shows in the original language. If you're aiming for festivals abroad, how to play jazz festivals covers that.
Your site, without the website work. Ask for your invitation.
Pages is the site and the Studio for musicians by The Jazz Passport. The technical side is done; you bring the music.