There has never been a better time for highlighting the importance of international marketing for businesses. Covid is more or less under control, borders are open and most importantly people are eager to spend their money. This is the time for putting hard marketing strategies into place and this doesn’t just mean investing a ton of money in a mammoth advertising campaign, but ensuring that all this well-researched material is translated effectively into the targeted markets languages.
The Importance of Translating Marketing Content
The key reason for adopting a marketing strategy that includes translations is that it has been proven time and time again that customers prefer to buy from a business that is targeting them in their own language. This gives them the opportunity to learn about the product, its warranty length, and whether it suits their requirements.
Cultural Considerations in Translation
Culture is integral to all communities and often the same cultural values are not shared with other countries. This could simply be the use of color that may have a different meaning in a different culture. It pays for a business to research the cultural features of its targeted customers before it devises its marketing campaign. This ensures that no mistakes are made when translating marketing content.
Transcreation
So it’s not just the translation that is important for a business’s marketing campaign but also transcreation which is a term that makes up the words “translation” and “creation”, It is the process of adapting a marketing message from one language to another while maintaining its initial style, intent, context, and tone. Not an easy thing for a translator to do but essential so that the customer who is targeted feels that the marketing material has just been developed for them and no one else. The translation feels natural as if the message has only been written in that one language.
The key step in the transcreation process is when the translator analyses the source text provided by the client. Once the text and the audience are understood the translator transcreates the source language into the targeted language.
The main advantage of transcreation for a business is the content is individually tailored to the target audience and its cultural background which is likely to attract more customers. The disadvantages of transcreation are its expense and the longer time required to complete a translation project
SEO and Translation
SEO is a technique used to get a business’s website to number one in the search engine rankings. An SEO translation isn’t a typical translation but it’s translating the content on a site in such a way that it still performs well in a search even after it’s been translated into the targeted language. An SEO translation will improve a business’s positioning on search engines in the country or countries a business intends to target. In order to achieve this, the keywords need to be translated by an SEO-specialist translator. A literal, word-for-word translation is almost always of no use in this case.
Choosing The Right Translation Services
There are several features of a good translation service which are:
- their effective translation and revision process;
- good reviews and recommendations from happy clients;
- Ability to complete a translation project on time and within the agreed budget.
What makes translations for businesses effective are the following translation services features:
- an ability to provide accurate translations;
- being culturally sensitive;
- offering transcreations;
- providing the translations in the agreed timeframe;
- always prepared to provide revisions if requested by the client to do so.