Experiment #5: DOES translating reources into other languages lead to sales on TpT?
This week, I’m going to try to release my best selling resource in French and Spanish.
- Spanish because the US is the largest market on Teachers Pay Teachers.
- French because I’m in Ontario and I feel for my French language colleagues who can never find decent resources.
Background
My buddy makes around $2,000 USD a month selling courses on Udemy. He’s paid for translations into other languages to crack into different markets, so I thought I’d see if that works for TpT as well.
I did work with a colleague to translate Growth Mindset Posters into French but those sales have been very low. Non-existant, actually.
A few thoughts about my French Growth Mindset posters.
1. The product page and title on TpT haven’t been translated yet.
I don’t think this product page shows up very much for people searching in French on TpT. So, the number of product page views is quite low.
But, this product page also doesn’t convert very well.
- 4.6% of people who look at the French Growth Mindset poster product page end up buying it.
In comparison,
- 7.2% of people who look at the English version end up buying that.
Posters in general, aren’t my best sellers. (The average conversion rate for all of my products is 7.0%)
2. Very few people in the US speak French. (And TpT is mostly an American market)
According to the US Census bureau:
- 239 million people speak English only.
- 41 million people speak Spanish
- 2 million people speak French, Haitian or Cajun
So, I’m guessing only 1% of teachers on TpT are looking for French resources.
(SIDE NOTE: I wonder where teachers in other countries buy their resources from… I need to look that up… Or, try selling resources in other markets outside of Teachers Pay Teachers)
3. My Growth Mindset Posters (PDF) in English are great, but they’re not my best selling product.
I’ve sold twice as many Character Education Lesson Plans and four times as many Good Citizenship Lesson Plans
Mind you, I’m not really sure what category people from Teachers Pay Teachers find the Citizenship lesson plan. It’s listed under English Language Arts, so I wonder if there is a category for French or Spanish Language Arts…
The Experiment
Things to do:
This week, my goal is to translate my Citizenship lesson plans from English into French and Spanish.
- Find a translator from Fiverr
- Copy the text from my powerpoint into an excel file to make it easier to translate. (So they don’t have to mess around with font-size or formatting.)
- Give them a copy of the slideshow for context
- Get them to translate the product page as well, so the entire resource is in French and Spanish.
- Create a French and a Spanish version.
- Upload to Teachers Pay Teachers
What will success look like
- Recover the cost for the initial translation
- Learn more about the market for French resources or Spanish resources
Things I’ve noticed and wondered about.
- How do you delete all of the slide notes from a Powerpoint? I’m trying to get the word count of my Citizenship slideshow to get a sense of how much this will cost to get translated…
- What version of French (or Spanish) should I translate into? I think Quebecois French can be different than French from France. I think that Latin American Spanish is different from Spanish in Spain. What Spanish is spoken in the US, and is written Spanish that different from spoken Spanish? Questions, questions…
- How do you quickly export text in Powerpoint slides into a Word document?
How to remove slide notes from powerpoint
A quick internet search found these instructions. PSST: Don’t forget to save your slideshow as a separate file (so you don’t lose all of your slide notes):
Click on the FILE menu
- Click info
- Click Inspect (CHECK FOR ISSUES)
- Click REMOVE ALL presentation notes.
Boom. Lesson plans in the notes are gone.
- 79 slides and 1760 words…
Questions:
- Do US schools have Spanish immersion classes the way we have French Immersion classes in Ontario?
- Who would the target audience of these resources be?
The Results
In the end, I was able to publish a Spanish Citizenship debate lesson package on Thu Dec 12, 2019 – so, slightly after my week deadline.
I found a translator on Fiverr.
Outsourcing and finding a translator reminded me of how much we live in a global economy and how we decide to buy products online.
What did I do? Went to Fiverr… searched up Spanish Translation… looked for the best sellers, read some bios, ratings and comments, and went from there.
It really goes to show how much tenured products must make – I would have been happy to go with someone just starting out, but it’s hard to judge quality without knowing how successful they are (i.e. do they have a lot of reviews because each review represents a sale) or seeing comments.
I thought about using machine translation with DeepL translation and then paying for someone on Fiverr to proofread the document.
I have a client who used to pay a local person for translations, but then decided they were really happy with the quality of DeepL machine translation, and now use them exclusively. (Don’t get us started on the poor translation quality in Google Translate or Facebook translation…)
In the end, I was able to translate my Spanish slideshow and handouts for $50 USD plus a few dollars for the Fiverr transaction fee.
Because my slideshows and handouts have a lot of duplicated sentences and repetition, I had to go through the document and pull out sentences into a Word document.
(Most of the translators on Fiverr charged a premium add on if they had to format translations.)
Now the question is to wait and see how well the Spanish translated lesson plan does.
Stay tuned…
