10 Reasons Why You Need Professional Marketing Translation
A business’s success depends so much on marketing. How you market your products or services determines if the enterprise will be successful or not. Without marketing, nobody knows who you are.
When a business reaches the international expansion stage, marketing plays an even more important role. International marketing demands not only a thorough market research, but also strong cultural sensitivity and deep local knowledge. In other words, if you want to enter a foreign market, you need to develop a multilingual, multicultural marketing campaign.
That’s when businesses and enterprises come to Language Service Providers (LSP) for help. Their linguistic competence is what many businesses lack, and LSPs can provide the Marketing Translation Service that they need to bring their products overseas.
1. Marketing campaigns in foreign markets have to be understandable.
Although English is the global language of today’s world, we still can’t deny the existence of thousands of other languages.
If you want to market your products to a family from a Latin American country whose mother tongue is Spanish, you are more likely to find success with an advertising copy written in Spanish.
You want your customers to understand your message. If they don’t even know what you’re talking about, what’s the point of doing marketing in the first place?
Researching the language of the targeted customers is one of the first steps market researchers take.
And it’s not as simple as “French people speak French, and German people speak German”.
Language is extremely complicated when dialects and language variants are involved.
For example, we all know that Canadians speak English and French. However, it’s worth noting that the French that Canadians is slightly different from the French that native French people use.
Similarly, Chinese people living in Mainland China use a simplified version of Chinese known as Simplified Chinese, while people living in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and other overseas Chinese communities use Traditional Chinese.
That’s not to mention the extremely nuanced differences in the same language between the regions.
Without deep local knowledge, marketing blunders are very likely to happen. And indeed, blunders have happened so frequently that they got featured in a lot of Marketing textbooks.
Convey your message to your customers in the language they use. And marketing translation agencies have enough local knowledge to choose the right language to use for your targeted region.
By communicating with your customers in the language they speak on a daily basis, you give them a sense of familiarity and belonging.
2. Marketing campaigns in foreign markets have to be relatable.
Marketing translation is the key to building a lasting relationship between a business and its foreign customers.
However, culture differs from region to region. You might not share the same values with your customers, and all relationships need to be built upon shared values.
People from China might not have the same reaction to an advertising copy that went viral in the US.
Vice versa, an advertising copy that failed miserably in the US turned out to be successful in other countries.
It’s all about the difference in perception. People from different regions don’t share the same values and attitudes towards a product or service.
In Marketing terms, there is a difference in consumer behavior.
That’s another reason why businesses need a professional Marketing translator. They are not just an average translator who knows the languages, but a translator who both knows the language and has enough cultural competence to translate a document while making it sound relevant to your customers.
And that is not an easy thing to do.
If you want to translate an advertisement for a Latin American, you need to know the words, phrases, and expressions that “click with them”.
Only native translators with exposure to the culture of that particular demographic can take on Marketing translation projects. If you hand your Marketing translation project to an average translator who has no idea how your demographic behaves, chances are that you’ll end up with a probably well-translated copy but not culturally relevant. Sometimes it might even sound forced, unnatural, or downright embarrassing.
3. Professional Marketing translation must keep the tone and style of the original document intact
Tone and style is everything of a Marketing copy.
Everyone can write copies, but not everyone can write copies that engage.
What we write is not as important as how we write it.
When writing a Marketing copy, the copywriter has to spend a lot of time and effort thinking up the best words, phrases, and sentences that capture the interest of the customers. They also have to keep a voice consistent throughout the copy.
Once a “brand voice” has been established, copywriters have to try their best to maintain that brand voice. Breaking out of that brand voice can result in reduced sales.
After all, a brand voice is what makes loyal customers loyal. They choose a brand because of what the brand delivers to them. Changing the tone can confuse them, which is a huge risk that many companies refuse to take.
Marketing translators have to retain the brand voice that copywriters cultivate and maintain ever since the first days of that company.
This is a truly challenging thing to do, because tone, voice, and style are much more difficult to control than other linguistic aspects.
For example, if you want to translate an advertisement for a car dealer, you need to translate it in a way that keeps the tone and personality of the copy.
If the original copy sounds “serious”, “raw” and “powerful”, the translation must also sound the same.
If the original copy sounds “funny”, “fresh”, “playful”, the translation must also convey the same emotion to the readers.
Of course, there is no quantitative metric to measure if a translation has retained the “style” from the original or not. Tone, style, and personality are intangible, but they are the essence of a copy. Only professional marketing translators with a flair for language can effectively recognize the tone and control it.
4. Marketing Translation brings the right information about your brand to your customer
Reaching and connecting with your customers is only the first step of doing Marketing. After that, you need to make sure that your customers understand what you have to offer.
Well-translated marketing content ensures that your customers understand the ins and outs of your products. In fact, it is legally required that you provide relevant information about your products and services to your customer.
It’s not just about being compliant. It’s also about enhancing the customer experience. Customers only want to buy things that they understand.
A good marketing translation takes into consideration the nuances of your product description, labels, listings, and many other marketing materials, and adapts them accurately to other languages. Marketing translators allow you to educate your customers, establish an image of professionalism, and bring them a top-notch user experience.
5. Good Marketing Translation boosts sales
It makes sense because the goal of a marketing campaign is to drive leads and conversions, which brings in profit.
Once a product has been advertised, it’s on the radar, and you have a chance of selling it.
Good Marketing Translation makes your ads not only understandable but also relatable. Marketing Translators make sure that your messages get conveyed accurately and can trigger an emotional response in the buyers.
Although they aren’t directly involved in your process, the translator is still one of the most important pieces to your marketing campaigns.
6. Good Marketing Translation Nurtures the Relationship with Your Customers (email marketing translation)
You don’t want your foreign customers to come and leave. You want them to return.
Trust and understanding is crucial. So how do international businesses nurture the relationship they have already had with their buyers?
By translating their email marketing campaign.
Email is a powerful channel. In fact, it is proven that email marketing is still very effective and has a high ROI, even in 2022. Email marketing in the form of newsletters drives traffic and educates your buyers on your brand.
If you have a multilingual customer base, it is a wise decision to invest into the translation for your email marketing campaign.
You’ll be able to improve your click-through rate and expand your readership to other countries where English is not an official language.
This can bring you an immense competitive advantage and put you in a better position than your competitors.
7. Professional Marketing Translation reduces the risk of having cultural offenses in your content
Cultural offense is what a lot of businesses are afraid of while expanding internationally.
They don’t have a deep understanding of the culture of the country they’re entering. They’re a foreigner, and there can be things about their foreign customers that they don’t know of.
That’s why it’s so important to have in-country marketing translators who can bring their local experience to the table.
Idioms, for example, can elicit very nuanced responses in the customers. The phrase commonly used in one country may evoke a negative response in another.
Similarly, brands should be culturally sensitive when attempting to portray a particular group of people in their marketing campaigns. If they don’t understand what should and shouldn’t be associated with that particular group, they can bring about marketing disasters.
Good Marketing translators go beyond translation. They will try to recognize, pick out, adjust, or go as far as to change completely a word, phrase, or sentence that seems offensive to the audience. Of course, they always inform the client of the adjustments they make or provide the clients with a back translation to help them better understand what and why they changed.
8. Good Marketing Translation Service provides you with valuable insights about your customers
Market Research is the first step of Marketing. It involves diving deep into the market to generate insights that will later be used in the campaign.
And sometimes a market report might not be written in the language that its readers understand. The data can be gathered from various sources that may be challenging to comprehend without a good marketing translation service.
Once you have understood the insights that these reports bring, you can start developing marketing strategies and create relevant content that engages.
9. Professional Marketing Translation protects the reputation of your brand
Marketing is a two-edged knife. It can only grow your reputation gradually, but one single wrong move is enough to ruin the reputation that you have worked so hard to build.
Mistakes in Marketing can range from small mistranslation that causes some hilarious embarrassment to huge blunders that lead to boycotting.
Whatever it is, mistakes like these all take a lot of time and effort to fix. And it’s very costly.
Professional marketing translators are aware of what they do. The reputation of the company they work with is at stake. In a way, we can see Marketing translators as a part of the company’s Marketing team themselves. They have to make sure that their translation is appropriate and acceptable.
10. High-quality Marketing Translation Service enables fast market entry
We are living in a highly globalized world. Everything is constantly changing, and the Translation industry is no exception. It also has to grow to keep up with the rising demand from the customers.
In some industries with cut-throat competition, you always want to be faster, sooner, and better than your competitors.
With all of the benefits listed above, there’s no reason you shouldn’t invest in a Marketing Translation Agency to adapt your marketing materials to the languages of your customers.
Thanks to the cutting-edge technology that translation agencies are now equipped with, it’s fairly easy to achieve a lot of the criteria for a good Marketing translation while still being cost-effective and speedy.
When partnering up with a translation agency, it is much easier for companies to gain a competitive advantage with localized advertisement and marketing copies. It’s a great investment that all businesses should make.
Conclusion
I hope that you love this article. Feel free to leave any comments below and share your thoughts on the topic.
P.S: Have a look at even more fascinating insights on translation and international business here.
