Are you an entrepreneur with the goal of expanding your business overseas? Do you already do business globally? Communication is crucial in both cases. However, without qualified professional support, it can be challenging to communicate with clients, employees, and vendors from other regions and cultures.
How do you successfully interact with that audience? How do you create effective business translations that clearly convey your message? First and foremost, you must understand your audience and form strong connections.
These 4 essential factors below can help.
1. Attention to Quality is Critical
The quality of translations goes well beyond grammar, syntax, and verb conjugation. How you say it is as important as what you say.
Make a great first impression. We’ve all read material that was objectively bad. It may have had phrasing that just didn’t fit or didn’t flow well. You may have had trouble understanding the meaning. The bottom line is that you were left with the feeling that the content creator didn’t care about the impression they were making. Accordingly, bear in mind that your translations are doing more for you than selling your products or your services. At the same time, they’re also helping you to make that ever-important first impression. And after all, it’s true what they say about first impressions – you never get a second chance. So, make yours count!
Tone and meaning matter. An effective translation process demands native speakers. Such linguists will be familiar with the local idioms and have a lifetime of experience communicating with the audience you’re trying to reach. A dictionary cannot teach local flavor.
Ads, marketing copy, and internal communications will be much more effective by using this approach. High-quality translations that are accurate and tailored to specific regions and cultures will score big points with your audience.
2. Curate Content and Save Money
Is all your content relevant to every audience internationally? Unlikely!
Product and service availability may differ between different regions. Why provide content about products people can’t purchase or services they don’t need? You run the real risk of customers or clients wondering what else you neglected to think about.
Avoid wasting money. Consider tailoring content for each language from the very beginning, paying attention to commercial and cultural expectations. This level of attention will not only keep translation services cost-effective but it will similarly streamline the workflow.
3. Adapt Translations for Different Content
Translations are not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Options for translating one type of content may not be suitable for another type. And if you are just getting started in an international market, choosing the right options may provide the savings you need to stay afloat.
Avoid shortcuts. There is a temptation to take shortcuts when the budget is tight, even to the point of using an online auto-translator like Google Translate. It’s cheap and it’s fast but it’s also incapable of delivering the level of quality your clients deserve and expect. Likewise, if you have internal communications in a foreign language, it may seem natural to leave the translation work to staff who speak it. With such an approach, perhaps the translation will be good enough to get your key points across. However, if you put either of these translations in front of a client, you won’t be conveying the same level of professionalism you do in English.
Trust the professionals. Any client-facing material requires professional quality. An employee who can speak the language is not a substitute for a professional translator. Appropriately qualified linguists have years of training and experience that ensure great results.
A translation and localization provider with a proven track record of success and a solid reputation will assign your project to a vetted professional translation team. The members of this team will be native speakers of the language in question and experts with full knowledge of any relevant industry-specific concepts.
When feasible, it’s also advisable for you to create highly important pieces in the target language rather than in English. This localization process will add to the relatability and authenticity of the piece for speakers of that language.
Of course, every piece of foreign language content should undergo a rigorous quality assurance process to make sure it’s accurate, error-free, and easily understood.
4. Choose the Right Project Management Team
Translation projects require time and resources to manage. A busy business owner or manager will find it’s in their best interest to leave the project management of their translation project to the professionals.
These projects can go far beyond the translations alone. If, for instance, the project involves a website translation, it could take many hours of manual effort to enter the completed translations into the website’s CMS.
Professional translation project managers can oversee the entire team, create timetables, assign manpower, allocate resources, and guide communications. So, the right translation company can cover all the bases of your global translation projects. Leave the translations to them so that you and your company can be free to build your brand.
Choosing the right translation company means selecting the team that will be your connection with clients, staff, and readers around the globe. The quality of that team will have a profound effect on your reputation and bottom line.
TrueLanguage offers premium business and technical translations in over 120 languages around the globe for companies of all sizes and types. With the full resources of TrueLanguage behind them, qualified and experienced linguists create fully localized translations for our clients. We offer a robust set of technical solutions and an adaptable, flexible, and responsive project management team. As your language-service provider, TrueLanguage can help ensure your company’s success worldwide.
Contact us today for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation and see what TrueLanguage can do for you!
