The Internet is a global market place and in order to reach the widest possible audience Internet content can be translated into multiple languages and adapted to appeal to different cultures. Website localization requires the special skills of a Business Translation Service. Business Translation Services can help not just with the actual translation of your material but also with the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, differences between different cultural appeal that can mean the difference between captivating your audience and losing their business.
Different cultures have different ideas about professionalism from the very proper and respectful Japanese culture to the stringent standards of German precision to the very laid-back Californian culture. A good Business Translation Service will help you understand nuances in the market you wish to reach and translate your material with the right tone to appeal to your market audience. Selling snow boards to students who take part-time jobs in Grenoble, France, requires a very different tone from selling stocks to retired business professionals, for example. You do this automatically in your own language, but you also need to make sure the right tone comes over in translation.
We all have horror stories of reading user manuals in translation that are impossible to understand or examples of translations that simply didn’t work. Some examples are now famous, like the American Chevy Nova that did poorly when marketed in Mexico and South America because Nova translates to “no go” which idiomatically in Spanish means that it doesn’t work. You need to pay careful attention to product names and marketing slogans and have a native speaker of the target language look them over for obvious gaffes. The best translations of marketing slogans are not translations at all, but reinventions of the slogan in the native language that culturally targets the audience without respect to an actual translation. Talk to your business translation service about whether they have marketing experts that are willing to come up with a completely different slogan for your product in the target language that speaks culturally to your audience.
Even though you are going to make sure you use a business translation service that specializes in professional translating, knows what they are doing, and has experts in your target cultural market, there is no point in unwittingly laying traps for your translators! Idioms and catch phrases are notoriously difficult to translate, hilariously funny or potentially offensive if mistranslated, and often have no equivalent in another language. It can be a real challenge to write content that is written in plain English, translates readily into a foreign language, and is still colorful enough to be interesting reading to a native English speaker.
Professional Business Translation Services often use quality control techniques that pass the translation from one translator to a checker. This is good because you want professional results, however passing the translation from one individual to another can introduce the risk of diluting the accuracy of the original translation. It may lose some of the punch of the original material, or even incorporate accidental mistranslations. You can ask the Business Translation Service if the end product is validated for accuracy against the original content.