DeepL translated content: publish before or after having it proofread by a native?

Question

I have a Dutch website that I am translating into a few different languages. Currently I translate the content with DeepL, have someone who speaks the language native proofread and edit the content and then upload it. Since I am dependent on the proofreaders, it takes a long time for all my articles to be published.

Even though I know SEO is a long game, we all want the results the quickest. So I was thinking, wouldn't it be 'quicker' if I just publish the DeepL translated content directly so that it can get indexed etc, and after that have people proofread it and publish the changes?

The question of course is; will it hurt to publish the DeepL translation FIRST, since that then will probably be indexed by Google, for it to be proofread and edited after? Or is it just better to initially upload the content in good quality?

Answer 1

Google seem to have shifted their position over the last few years so that you're now very unlikely to get into any trouble for indexing it in advance, unless the translations are particularly poor.

5 years ago, Google's John Mueller said

I don't think that would trigger manual actions, but if the translations are bad, then it's bad content in general :). However, machine translation is much much better than it used to be. Another option: noindex until reviewed by local users / speakers.

Translation has come on loads since then, and whilst not specifically mentioned, your use case almost certainly comes under their acceptable use of AI, ie as something useful to users - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content

I'd recommend that your translator works on pages in order of importance - ie work on the homepage first.

Be wary that the translation may have introduced some inaccurate information, so depending on what your site is for, this could cause potentially serious problems. It might be worth putting a disclaimer on untranslated pages, with a link to the original page for anyone who speaks that language.

You should also make sure that you add the appropriate meta data to cross-link the sites by language. It's a common SEO scam to steal and translate content. Linking them properly should indicate they are intended as translations of the same page, and the original content is yours.