If you’re new to the language service industry, it may seem a little confusing. Do you translate your content or localise it? But it doesn’t stop there.
In summary: Midults, aged 35-55, challenge stereotypes as a digitally savvy and financially confident consumer group often neglected by marketers. With significant online presence and consumer influence, they require tailored strategies that recognize their unique lifestyles and preferences, reflecting a shift away from traditional demographic assumptions.
Whether you’re reaching new customers in another country with a localised website or making language versions of your mobile app, there are other services that can complement a traditional translation to help you effectively communicate your brand to international audiences.
Transcreation
Transcreation is a form of creative translation where linguists act as both translators and copywriters in order to effectively get the message across to the reader. Transcreation takes cultural and contextual differences between source and target markets which result in cultural adjustments being to be made to the content.
As a result, you’ll find that transcreated content is often written as if it were uniquely created for the target market and delivers the same message as the source text did to the readers in the original language. Transcreation is best for print ads, tag lines, headlines or any kind of creative copy where you want to produce something uniquely tailored to a specific market.
Cultural sensitivity research
Cultural sensitivity is the awareness of specific cultural factors that can influence the way messages are received. This research can be used in a variety of ways in different industries, from product development to marketing campaigns.
In the language service industry, cultural sensitivity research is used throughout the localisation and transcreation processes to ensure linguists and global marketers are aware of cultural nuances when localising content.
For example, slags and idioms that are well known in one market will most likely not translate well in another. Photos, images, icons and logos might convey meanings that you may not have intended. Even products that see well in your domestic market might not fare well in East Asian markets like China.
When cultural sensitivity research is done properly, brands can effectively communicate the appropriate messaging for the specific market without making questionable language faux pas.
Multilingual copywriting
In some cases, many brands decide that translation or even transcreation isn’t the most suitable course of action. In this case, some content might need to be uniquely created in another language to captivate audiences in new markets. This type of service is typically used for creative content such as blog posts and editorial content for fashion or retail brands.
Linguists used for multilingual copywriting aren’t necessarily highly skilled translators but are experienced copywriters and the service is a highly creative one. It also requires a highly thorough briefing process and continued open communication with the end client to ensure content is produced to their specification.
As a result, multilingual copywriting can be priced higher per hour and is typically more expensive than translation.
International SEO
When you’re localising your web presence for international audiences, it doesn’t stop at the words on your website. It’s crucial for your website to rank well on search engines that users predominantly use in their home markets.
If you have a Chinese version of your English website, you want to rank well on Baidu rather than Google. Similarly, if you have a newly localised Russian website, Yandex will be the search engine of choice for Russians. This is where International SEO comes in.
International SEO adds an additional layer of complexity which takes into account the specific linguistic, cultural and technical elements required to rank well on the most popular search engines in your target market.
Things you’ll need to consider are:
- the most popular search engines for each market
- ranking factors for each search engine
- the right domain and URL structure
- research and localisation of keywords
- content creation relevant to your audience
- Implementation of relevant tags on multilingual webpages
- Measuring, monitoring and optimising your SEO efforts
Machine Translation
Machine translation (MT) isn’t necessarily new, but it’s certainly grown in popularity in the language service industry as the technology behind it, machine learning, has made significant improvements to automated translations.
You’ll need a sufficient amount of translation memory (a database of segments containing sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units that have been previously translated) to start with, along with a partnership with a reputable language service provider who will manage the machine translation engine on your behalf.
Only certain types of content are suitable for machine translation and some machine translation engines perform better than others for different subject matters and language pairs.
Post-edited Machine Translation (PEMT) on the other hand is a translation produced by a machine and then edited by a professional translator. This service is a little more expensive than MT alone as a linguist is required to make further edits to the machine-translated content. PEMT is best used for consumer-facing content where style and tone of voice are not critical.
A language service provider should always analyse your content and translation memories to find out if MT is the right fit for you.
Want more information about eCommerce localisation with examples of how some of the worlds top retail and travel brands have used them? We partnered with Econsultancy on a research report identifying localisation opportunities and challenges with a panel of eight leading brand marketers.
You can download the report for free below.