In your personal and professional travels, you have encountered many translation mistakes that put a smile on your face but certainly leave plenty to be desired. More often than not, these are marketing translations in that the signs are posted in business environments, say, a hotel or a bar.
Take, for example, a Parisian dress shop advertising its ready-to-wear clothes: Dresses for street walking. You can easily get the funny message – street walking is equivalent to prostitution in the States – but the clueless shop owner will not. You may even find it inappropriate to enter the shop to buy clothes, thus, leading to one lost customer for the owner.
This is where the importance of hiring the right professionals for marketing translations comes in. You will find that an excellent job on business translations is well worth the money paid to the professionals to do it. The benefits are far too many to ignore:
• Broaden your customer base. If you have an official website where non-English speakers are welcome to shop for products and services, you want your clientele to easily understand its contents. For example, if your target clientele includes the Hispanic community, translating the website’s contents into Spanish makes it more attractive to them. Your customer base has just expanded.
• Respect for unique aspects of culture. It is not just translating the contents of the website, the brochure and other advertising materials on a word-for-word basis that matters with professional marketing translations. The distinctive aspects of the language like dialects, idioms and colloquialisms are also taken into account, thus, allowing for better communication. Don’t make the mistake either of telling your prospective clientele that, “Guests must leave their values at the front desk” when what you wanted to say was, “Guests must leave their valuables at the front desk”.
• Accurate representation of currency, time and other values of measurements. It is important in business translations to provide for quantitative information that the reader will readily relate to. For example, conversion of the metric system to the imperial system of measurement in certain parts of Europe is necessary for quick understanding.
Indeed, getting the best professionals to perform marketing translations for your website and other company documents like brochures is critical in your plans for expansion. Communication, after all, is the foundation upon which success in the industry lies on.
Take, for example, a Parisian dress shop advertising its ready-to-wear clothes: Dresses for street walking. You can easily get the funny message – street walking is equivalent to prostitution in the States – but the clueless shop owner will not. You may even find it inappropriate to enter the shop to buy clothes, thus, leading to one lost customer for the owner.
This is where the importance of hiring the right professionals for marketing translations comes in. You will find that an excellent job on business translations is well worth the money paid to the professionals to do it. The benefits are far too many to ignore:
• Broaden your customer base. If you have an official website where non-English speakers are welcome to shop for products and services, you want your clientele to easily understand its contents. For example, if your target clientele includes the Hispanic community, translating the website’s contents into Spanish makes it more attractive to them. Your customer base has just expanded.
• Respect for unique aspects of culture. It is not just translating the contents of the website, the brochure and other advertising materials on a word-for-word basis that matters with professional marketing translations. The distinctive aspects of the language like dialects, idioms and colloquialisms are also taken into account, thus, allowing for better communication. Don’t make the mistake either of telling your prospective clientele that, “Guests must leave their values at the front desk” when what you wanted to say was, “Guests must leave their valuables at the front desk”.
• Accurate representation of currency, time and other values of measurements. It is important in business translations to provide for quantitative information that the reader will readily relate to. For example, conversion of the metric system to the imperial system of measurement in certain parts of Europe is necessary for quick understanding.
Indeed, getting the best professionals to perform marketing translations for your website and other company documents like brochures is critical in your plans for expansion. Communication, after all, is the foundation upon which success in the industry lies on.
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