By With more businesses and services transitioning online and attempting to appeal to a global audience, the ability to quickly and seamlessly translate their products and services into other languages is paramount. This process used to be much more difficult and would require extensive labor from translators. Nowadays, businesses and organizations can use software to streamline this process.
However, many of these software programs fail to understand the complexities associated with copywriting and marketing campaigns. Marketing translation requires much more than simply translating an advertisement or blog from English to French.
Any successful marketing material requires a business to understand its audience. Factors like knowing what they want, the tone of voice they engage with, and what’s culturally applicable to them are all crucial.
Using a marketing translation service like SYSTRAN can help businesses avoid common pitfalls.
What Are Translations in Marketing?
Although the definition for translation is pretty straightforward—converting words or text from one language into another—translations for marketing are a bit more complex. Marketing translation differs significantly from other translations, such as legal, technical, and medical translations.
For legal, technical, and medical translations, a word-for-word translation with additional tweaks for clarity may be enough. However, in marketing, the process is more difficult as companies need to translate materials that can appeal to different cultures.
In marketing translations, companies can use three major methods. Often these methods may be combined for better results.
- Standard Translations: This cost-effective method is often used for product descriptions, instructions, training documents, and other materials that are more technical by nature.
- Localization: Localization requires a company to be aware of cultural differences and nuances when translating its materials. Anything from religious beliefs, consumers’ general attitudes, and cultural quirks, to superstitions, can play a role.
- Transcreation: Linguistic devices like puns, similes, metaphors, and idioms can be highly effective but may not always stick in another language. Transcreation can preserve a message’s style, tone, and context while adapting it so a global audience can understand. Examples often include slogans, product names, and advertisements.
It’s essential to know how a global audience will perceive your brand. A poor translation in marketing can result in confusion, ineffectiveness, and even negative reactions such as taking offense.
Of course, the question then becomes how can a company effectively implement successful strategies to appeal to a global market?
How Do You Translate Marketing Materials?
There are different methods for translating your marketing materials. While having human translators available should always be a consideration, there are methods you can use to automate the translation of your marketing materials.
Machine translations have become increasingly popular with major advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there are different machine translations available, translating every piece of material can be tedious and frustrating. That’s why there are also translation management systems.
Sometimes referred to as translation management software, a TMS helps you manage and automate both the translation and localization of marketing materials. A detailed and robust TMS like SYSTRAN can help you translate and localize several languages with 1,000+ translation models.
Advantages a cutting-edge TMS like SYSTRAN can offer include:
- Allows you to translate several marketing materials into different languages efficiently and effectively.
- Contextualizes translated content to fit your brand’s identity, tone, and vision.
- Helps automate key management features like estimating costs, scheduling, quality assessments, and interacting with stakeholders.
- Utilizes translation memory to identify how texts were translated in the past, leading to a more rapid process when translating new text or documents.
More companies have been using advanced software like SYSTRAN. We have global partners across several different businesses and industries. Partners have included ecommerce industries like Amazon, companies like Microsoft, defense and security partners like GICAT (Groupement des Industries Françaises de Défense Terrestre), colleges and universities, and much more.
Contact SYSTRAN Today
Marketing translation services are dramatically changing the game today by making it easy for businesses to reach a wider audience. To combat the many challenges global marketing poses, companies can turn to SYSTRAN for a more effective and efficient translation of marketing materials.
Call SYSTRAN today to see how we can help your business!
