In Part I of the E is for Expertise stage of this series on International Communications, I talked about the importance of making sure you have the right expertise working on your translation projects and looked at the required characteristics and skill set you should be looking for in your chosen partners.
But some of you might be asking, “Why bother? Can’t I just do it online without it costing me anything?” Well, yes you could, but here’s what you need to remember before you make that decision:
- You must be confident it says the right thing
If it’s important for you to get the right message across in your UK markets, it should be equally important to say the right thing in your overseas markets. And unless you have some way to check the output from a free, online translation tool, how do you know it does say what you want it to say?
To give you an example, we worked with a machinery manufacturer who already had some of their terms and phrases “translated”. Unfortunately a free, online tool had been used so the phrase “cutter jam”, i.e. a jam in the cutter section of the machinery, had been translated as “cutter-flavoured marmalade”.
- You need to protect your brand and reputation
You will have spent a lot of time building up your reputation and brand in your domestic market, so you need to make sure it is upheld and reinforced in your foreign markets. How many times have you read poorly-translated instructions when trying to set-up a new gadget or device? And what does it make you think about the product you have purchased? There is usually an underlying feeling that if the instructions are poor-quality, the product could be too.
The last thing you want is to give this impression about your own product or service in your foreign markets. Think about the example above. If you were one of the foreign-speaking operatives of the machinery and a warning popped up about “cutter-flavoured marmalade”, how much confidence would you have in the machine itself, or the company who manufacture it?
- Investing in good translation is just that: an investment.
If you want to ensure you succeed in a foreign market, you need to show a commitment to trading there. And there is no better way to show your commitment than communicating with your target audience in their language… correctly! It can pay dividends if you get it right and help to grow markets.
As Willy Brandt said:
So, don’t be fooled into thinking that it doesn’t matter what your text says just because you can’t read or understand it. If you want to be taken seriously in your target global markets, you need to ensure you are communicating with your customers correctly at a local level, in their language not yours.
As Nelson Mandela put it, “if you speak to a man in a language he understands it goes to his head, but if you speak to a man in his own language it goes to his heart”.
By Helen Provart, Managing Director, June 2017
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