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