Translating is Hard, Getting Professional Translations is Easy

Translation is anything but simple. Having complete mastery of two or more languages is a valuable, yet intricate skill that requires years of experience. And discerning between slight variations in grammar and vocabulary requires nothing less than mastery.

There’s no computer that can translate as well as a bilingual — at least not yet. According to a recent article in The Guardian, many businesses make the mistake of trusting their translation to computers, which just gives them a cheap result:

It’s important to remember that just being able to speak a language doesn’t qualify a person – or a computer – to translate it accurately. Relying on the cheapest methods could prove a false economy, particularly when there’s a lot at stake and you need an expert not just in a language, but also in a specific area such as contract law, software development or HR.

The good news is that having your content translated doesn’t have to be so complicated. By outsourcing it to a professional translator, you know that your content will read as if a native speaker wrote it. And when you’re entering a foreign market for the first time, this is a priceless advantage. According to a recent Econsultancy article, you shouldn’t necessarily trust any translation unless a native speaker took a look at it:

Language subtleties can often appear as tiny minutiae in many ways, but even the slightest nuances noticed only by native speakers might trigger the wrong understanding of a message. Therefore, thorough knowledge of the linguistic landscape, language correlations and the expectations of the online platform and target audience is required to make the right decision on what version to use in what context.

Here are a few things you should consider translating if you want to expand globally:

• Your website: This is the first thing you’ll have to translate. Here it’s especially important that you have a professional translation in a second language, rather than just rely on automated translation. Users shouldn’t have trouble understanding what exactly your products and services are.
• Content: According to basic content marketing principles, you should be creating new blogs, articles, and white papers regularly. It’s important that you translate this content so your new target audience can read it.
• Social media posts: Whether you’re posting your content or just giving an update on Facebook, you should do so in multiple languages. It’s up to you whether you create a separate post or just include the translation in the original post.
• Marketing emails: Sending marketing emails is a great way to attract users from your new target audience. Sometimes you’ll just be able to translate the original email and sometimes you’ll have to create a new email entirely for the market abroad. The important thing is that users receive messages in their native language.

As you can see, this process is entirely scalable. It’s fine if you just want to translate your website, but you can also increase your marketing efforts by translating your social media posts, blogs, and emails. It doesn’t matter how much content you want to have translated; with professional translation services, the quality will stay high.

As a business owner or a marketer, you don’t necessarily need to know the differences between the dialects in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. You don’t even need to know how to conjugate basic verbs or declination nouns.

What you do need to know, however, is that your source of translation is effective. That means that you’re not going to get any of the unwelcome surprises that Google Translate likes to sneak in.

To talk more about translating your content, or anything else contact us today.