Marketing and advertising translation

Marketing Translation

Speaking the Right Language

You’ve spent years honing your brand, ensuring the features and benefits of your products and services meet the exact requirements of your customers. The last thing you need is to ruin all that hard work by having your adverts, brochures, websites, press releases or emails badly translated.

It’s Funny When Other People Get Translation Wrong…

And it’s not just the little people who get ‘Lost in Translation’, here are a few examples of the big boys getting things disastrously wrong:

• When Kentucky Fried Chicken translated their slogan ” Finger lickin’ good” into Chinese, it came out as “Eat your fingers off”
• In Italy, a campaign for “Schweppes Tonic Water” translated the name into ” Schweppes Toilet Water”!
• When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, it was apparently unaware that “no va” in Spanish means ” it won’t go”

…we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen to you

You’ve got to admit that they are funny, but you don’t want to be the one to be laughed at. So, ensuring your marketing material is translated accurately is critical – not just for your company, or your clients, it’s vital for your career.

To avoid mis-translation, we only use qualified in-country translators. They know the local market and its customs which ensures that your adverts and promotions have the desired effect when localised into your target language.

Ensuring Your Message is Understood

Translation in itself is not always the answer to your language requirements, in particular where marketing or creative material is concerned. When copy needs to be adapted so it feels as if it has been written specifically for a market, or key phrases such as a play on words or alliteration need to be maintained, literal translation is not the answer.

We pride ourselves on overcoming all of these problems through using the correct processes right from the start:

Your country managers are involved from the start in selecting the right style and voice of translation and direct liaison is maintained on an ongoing basis if that’s what you need.

Only translators with previous creative expertise within your industry will be used, this ensures the creative elements of the original copy are not lost in translation and your translated documents returned the way you need them.

We’ll build a database of agreed company and industry terminology to ensure consistency throughout your documents.

Our teams of page layout specialists take your DTP files and put the translated copy into your layout.

We can work with all the current industry standard software on Macintosh and PC:

• QuarkXpress
• InDesign
• Pagemaker
• Framemaker
• Microsoft Publisher
• Powerpoint
• Freehand
• Illustrator
• Photoshop

Advertising Translation

A global market needs a multilingual approach to advertising and branding and that’s where effective and accurate translation services are needed

Translating your brand

Every industry and subject has its own peculiarly terminology and getting this right is very important for advertising and branding where communicating the right messages is vital. Our project managers will work with you to ensure that our translators use the correct terms and descriptions consistent with your branding. We can even translate your brand guidelines and pass them back to you to sign off before we begin the translation of your documents.

This set up phase will ensure that you are fully happy that your brand values are protected in the translation and therefore will be fine when your advertising hits the streets in your target country.

Translating directly into your design

We pride ourselves in being able to work with any type of file format. So if you have a brochure designed in QuarkXpress, a billboard in Adobe InDesign, an XML feed into your website or you have a bespoke content management system, your translation will be delivered in the exact format you need.

Translation Memory to save you time and money

So that your translations are as accurate as possible we use translation memory. This works by “remembering” passages of translated text in your advertising and offering those translations to the translator when it sees a good match. Overtime this builds up and becomes more and more efficient and accurate. On top of all that it also means that we can hit tighter deadlines and save you money.

200 Languages and over 16,000 professional linguists

Whatever languages you need translating, we have the professional linguists who are right for you. With over 14,000 professional translators on our data base, we have someone for every type of subject. So you don’t need to worry if your advert is for hair products in Hungarian or soft toys translated into Swedish, we have the experts who’ll help you.

Translation for PR

Translation for Public Relations

The whole world’s a stage now and any company who is serious about being a world player has to manage their public image globally. You need to keep a tight reign on your PR messages at the best of times so when they are translated into other languages you need a translation company you can trust.

Terminology and Glossaries

Every industry and subject has its own specific terminology and getting this right is vital to ensuring the right messages are conveyed in your press releases. Our project managers will work with you to ensure that our translators use the correct terms and descriptions in your press releases. This set up phase will ensure that all ongoing translations are of a very high quality and that they can be delivered to you to hit your deadlines.

Translation Memory to Save You Time and Money

As you have more and more documents translated we will be building your translation memory. Translation memory works by “remembering” passages of translated text in your press announcements and offering those translations to the translator when it sees a good match. This software increases the accuracy and speed of translation and because the translator doesn’t have to translate passages twice, just check the accuracy of the context, reduces the price as well.
200 Languages and Over 16,000 Professional Linguists

Whatever languages you need translating, we have the professional linguists who are right for you. With over 14,000 professional linguists on our database, we have a translator for every conceivable subject many with journalistic and copywriting experience.

Teams of Project and Quality Managers

To ensure you have the best service and quality we have teams of project and quality managers who control your translation project at every point. They ensure that only qualified translators with the skills you need are used on your projects and that we work with you to use the correct language and terminology for your translated project. To underpin all this we work to the BS EN 15038 standard for translation as well as using the ISO 9001 framework.

Customer Portal

So that you can access our services as easily as possible we have a secure customer portal Talkbase.net. This site allows you and your team to view all your new and previous projects. It also allows you to review your translation projects online in real time and submit amendments and changes. This cuts down the need for translations to be moved around via email and because it’s online you can access it wherever you are in the world at any time. This service is very relevant for fast moving content such as press releases.

Translation for publishing

Using a Translator to Suit Your Style

Translation for publishing is all about style. As all your writers have their own distinct style the translations of their writing have to be done very carefully. You’ll need to think long and hard about whether you want your translated publication to have the same style as your original one.

While it may sound like a cliché, certain terms or phrases may get “Lost in Translation” if they don’t exist in the target language or country of your publication. So, it may be that your publication has to be modified to suit your target market. This is a very delicate process which our team of project managers along with the translators can help you with.

Translating Directly into Your Design

We pride ourselves in being able to work with any type of file format. So if your publication is Word, QuarkXpress, InDesign, an XML feed into your website or you have a bespoke content management system, your translation will be delivered in the exact format you need.

Translation Memory to Save You Time and Money

So that your translations are as accurate as possible we use translation memory. This works by “remembering” passages of translated text in your publication and offering those translations to the translator when it sees a good match.

This works especially well with translation for publishing because of the large amount of translated text. Overtime this builds up and becomes more and more efficient and accurate. On top of all that it also means that we can hit tighter deadlines and save you money.
200 Languages and Over 16,500 Professional Linguists

Whatever languages you need translating, we have the professional linguists who are right for you. With over 16,500 professional translators on our database, we have someone for every type of subject.
Teams of Project and Quality Managers

To ensure you receive the best service and quality we have teams of project and quality managers who control your translation project at every point. They ensure that only qualified translators with the skills you need are used on your projects and that we work with you to use the correct language and terminology for your translated project. To underpin all this we work to the BS EN 15038 standard for translation as well as using the ISO 9001 framework.
Customer Portal

So that you can access our services as easily as possible we have a secure customer portal TalkBase.Net. This site allows you and your team to view all your new and previous projects. It also allows you to review your translation projects online in real time and submit amendments and changes. This cuts down the need for translations to be moved around via email and because it’s online you can access it wherever you are in the world at any time.

Translation and Interpreting for Events and Conferences

Events, conferences and trade shows are now truly international affairs with exhibitors and visitors travelling from all over the world to attend and network with their industry peers.

If your event is to attract this type of visitor clearly all your promotional material from the booking information leaflets to the event website need to be translated in to the languages of your target visitors. Getting this translation right and on message is what our specialist translators are excellent at. So if your event is the annual tractor fair or an international finance summit we can ensure that your translated information is perfect for that audience.

Translating Directly into Your Design

We pride ourselves in being able to work with any type of file format. So if you have a brochure designed in QuarkXpress, an exhibition stand in Adobe InDesign, a presentation in PowerPoint of a Flash animation for a demonstration your translation will be delivered in the exact format you need.
But What do You do When Your International Visitors Arrive?

Your international visitors will of course want to get the most from the conference and this will include speaking to the exhibitors and other attendees. This is where Applied Language’s interpreting services can help you create a whole visitor experience.

Conference Interpreters

Your keynote speakers are the jewels in the crown of your exhibition or show. Your visitors have travelled a long way to hear them speak. The last thing you want to do is to put anything in the way of having that speech talked about and reported for a long time after the event. Our highly qualified interpreters will ensure that each and every word is being conveyed to your audience, whether they are interpreting at the front of the speech or are delivering the interpretation from a booth. We can also supply British Sign Language interpreters to assist your deaf visitors.

Appointments and Meetings with Instant Interpreters

Your event can really stand out from the crowd by allowing your visitors, of whatever nationality to be able hold meetings at your conference in their native languages. Applied Language’s Instant Telephone Interpreting service can be used on any type of phone. This will mean that deals can be done there and then at your exhibition or event. Imagine how much great publicity this will generate for you at a minimal cost. Instant Telephone Interpreting only costs £1 or $1.50 per minute with no set up fees or minimum charges and there aren’t even any technical issues involved.

200 Languages and Over 16,000 Professional Linguists

Whatever languages you need translating or interpreting, we have the professional linguists who are right for you. With over 16,000 professional linguists on our database, we have someone for every type of subject.

Brand Checking Service

Marketing a new product or service is hard enough at the best of times. Choosing a name can take months for your brand and a whole lot of budget. Just imagine what would happen if after all that work, you found that you couldn’t market your product internationally because it had all kinds of issues.

Here are just a few of the possible pitfalls:

• The name’s already in use
• Your chosen brand name has an offensive meaning in your target country
• The colours you have chosen are unlucky in the county of your launch
• The brand name you’ve picked doesn’t translate well and the meaning is changed
• Your product is culturally offensive

Lots of really big companies have already made these mistakes. The list is long – Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Fiat, Schweppes, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

All the hassle with marketing, PR, merchandising and production could have been saved if only they’d used our “International Brand Checking Service”.

International Brand Checking Service

The service is simple. After working with our clients to identify what they want to achieve in the target market, we give ten in-country linguists a list of upto 20 questions about your brand, name or product, you can either supply them yourself or we have a standard set of questions you can use. Our multilingual staff go though the list and research the answers for you. All our brand checkers live in country so have an in-depth knowledge of the country and culture.

We’ll send all the completed questionnaires back to you to help you make your decision. If you then need further questions, we can help you with that too.

To order this service email enquiries@appliedlanguage.com or call +44 (0)845 367 7000 from the UK or +1 (800) 579 5010 from the US.