Translation services are important for any business, and high translation quality doesn’t come easily. Powerful and effective translation requires thorough knowledge of the subject matter, and that is why there is always specialization within the translation industry.
One of these specializations is marketing translation, which is focused only on translating marketing materials. That requires multiple things beyond language translation, including extensive marketing knowledge and careful consideration of what is needed to deliver messages in different languages effectively.
In this detailed blog, we are sharing everything you would like to know about translating marketing materials, including why it should matter to every business and how to ensure that you take full advantage of it.
Table of contents
Marketing Translation is the translation and adaptation of marketing collateral and campaigns to different languages. It is more than just accurately translating words from one language to another; it can involve localizing your website and optimizing it for search engines, transcreating your brand names, slogans, and taglines, adding subtitles and voice over to your videos, and much more.
In fact, it’s considered a specialization of its own in translation. Besides native-language proficiency in both the source and target languages, a marketing translator should have:
- Marketing Expertise: a marketing translator should have a deep understanding of marketing, advertising, and consumer behavior.
- Cultural Sensitivity: a marketing translator should have insider knowledge of the cultural nuances and norms of the countries in question to provide culturally-fit translations that respect your target audiences and resonate with them.
- Writing Skills: a marketing translator should be a writer at heart, having the talent to craft engaging and persuasive messages and use different tones and styles to deliver appealing translations.
Common Marketing Materials that Require Translation
- Website Content
- Blog Posts and Newsletters
- Landing Pages
- Social Media
- Email Copies
- Company Profiles
- Presentations
- Press Releases
- Product Packagings
- Product Descriptions
- Video Advertisements
- Billboards
- Posters and Flyers
- Brochures and Catalogs
Translating every type of these documents can help businesses unlock major benefits. However, to fully benefit, businesses must assure that the translation is delivered with outstanding quality.
There are many benefits to translating marketing materials, especially when done by professional translators with extensive knowledge of the marketing industry. Here are some of the biggest ones:
- 1. Reaching More Audiences
If you want to enter foreign markets, then your multilingual marketing is mainly focused on this objective. And to achieve this, translating your marketing messages should speak and appeal to different audiences in their native languages.
People can connect better with marketing campaigns and other resources provided in their native language. You can expect marketing campaigns to perform much better when translated.
These are some research-based statistics that show the importance of marketing translation:
- 2. Boosting Brand Awareness
Your brand can interact with people and build a true bond with them if you can communicate with them in their own language. Introducing your brand through localized marketing, in a way that they can resonate with, affects their perception of the brand and its offerings.
This way, you can boost your brand awareness, making your brand more recognizable and making people more attached to the brand, until they become loyal promoters.
For example, in 2021, Amazon completed its acquisition of the Middle Eastern Souq.com and launched in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
To announce this acquisition and official launch in Egypt, they shared a video ad that featured a song in Arabic, specifically the Egyptian dialect. The video/song was titled: سوق بقي امازون, which translates to Souq is now Amazon. The ad helped build brand awareness and facilitate brand recognition in the market.
- 3. Cutting Down Frustration and Bad Customer Support Cost
The goal of marketing translation is to optimize the customer journey to eventually make a purchasing decision. This requires that translating marketing content covers every interaction and relevant information that can be translated, to bring your target customers to the final checkout and payment stage. But that’s not all.
The purchase and post-purchase support is crucial. According to Shopify, eCommerce platforms that localized currencies have seen a 40% increase in conversion rates. From currency and payment gateways to return policy and customer support, if you can’t provide multilingual communications to manage these stages, you are risking low customer retention and profit losses.
- 4. Improving Your Rankings
When people search with any keyword on Google, the search engine ranks relevant results using complex algorithms. It’s what is commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
These algorithms will definitely favor you if you are publishing content in the language the user is searching with or the language of the location the user searches from.
This means that translating marketing materials can mean more organic outreach to new customers looking for businesses offering services and products you offer.
With more advanced practices like international SEO (SEO Localization), paired with localized website copies to the locales of target markets, a huge customer base can be outreached by companies seeking to penetrate new markets and boost their sales.
There’s a common misconception that international SEO is the same thing as SEO but for different languages. That’s an understatement. From keyword translation and content localization to URL optimization and Hreflang, there is so much that goes into an effective international SEO strategy. And it’s why you need an expert international SEO agency.
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How to Prepare For Translating Marketing Materials?
Before getting started with translating marketing materials, you may need to set a clear scope for the effort and costs you will spend.
It is definitely better to have this scope documented in any way you prefer, so that you are able to organize priorities and understand your requirements in a better way.
Having a clear scope for your professional marketing translation projects can also help you choose an expert translation and localization company to work with. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself to be able to set a clear scope for your upcoming marketing translation efforts:
1. What global markets are you targeting? There are huge different markets around the world, and if you are going global or regional, you need to define what markets should have a greater priority. Knowing the foreign markets you will target will help you determine the languages you would give priority to in translation easily.
2. How much would you spend on this project? According to your finances, you can set a cost that would suit your business for marketing translation, in a way that doesn’t become a burden. A professional translation company can help you with this.
3. Will you hire translators or a translation company? Whether you will hire a translator or a translation company is a crucial question. A freelancer can be better equipped for one-time, small projects. But a translation company can manage large, cross-disciplinary projects that usually include full-scale marketing translation and localization. We’ll dive more into this later in the blog.
4. How will you determine the success of marketing translation? As you set KPIs to measure the success of your marketing campaigns, you should also set ones that help you measure your translation ROI, including market share, the volume of new customers, and conversion rate.
5 Tips to Ensure Translating Marketing Materials Is Effective and Efficient
Managing a translation project can have more aspects than it initially seems. If you want to ensure a professional marketing translation project goes smoothly and brings the best possible outcomes, here is what you need to do:
- 1. Know Your Target Audience and Cultural Differences
When it comes to translating marketing materials to different languages, not every copy should be translated the same way to every target language. Some copies shouldn’t even exist at all. This depends on the cultural preferences of each region. Something that is normal in one culture can be disrespectful in another. Being aware of the culture of the people you are translating for is essential; it is a make-or-break aspect when it comes to marketing copies.
Coca-Cola is perhaps one of the most remarkable brands for successful global marketing campaigns that resonate with local cultures. Take, for instance, the “Share a Coke” Campaign which featured Coca-Cola bottles with names and caused a sensation.
The campaign, which was localized into over 80 languages, didn’t only use popular names in every country but made a twist to use nicknames to appeal to their customers in China.
- 2. Keep your Brand's Voice Consistent
Having a consistent brand voice is essential, and it shouldn’t vanish with translated marketing materials and copies. For example, if your brand voice is youthful, it should be the same in all languages.
The brand voice can also be adjusted to suit different audiences, but that should still be done strategically and not randomly.
Looking for a Specialized LSP?
The search for a specialized LSP can be daunting. Discover common market research translation challenges and conduct productive meetings with your LSP, thanks to our free Client Guide.- 3. Make Use of Transcreation
Transcreation is a widely known term in the translation industry that entails translating content while creating an entirely new copy for the target language. A transcreated marketing copy can deliver the same idea, but in a different way in the target language.
Knowing when to use translation and when to use transcreation is important, especially with translation in marketing.
- 4. Use Feedback From Customers
Making use of user feedback to know whether your translations work is a great tool. This feedback should be cleverly gathered without affecting user experience, and it can be gathered through your app or website.
Having the feedback, you can use it to enhance future translations if needed and to ensure that your efforts aren’t in vain.
- 5. Assess Translators Thoroughly
Having a thorough look at your translation team profiles is important. Making sure that they have experience and a diverse portfolio of marketing translation projects can be the reassurance you need to let them handle your projects. When working with a translation agency, you can request to check the profiles and assess the qualifications of the translation team that is going to be in charge of your project.
How to Choose The Best Marketing Translation Company: 3 Key Considerations
- 1. Choose a Company with Localization Expertise
Translating marketing materials, as previously mentioned, is a specialized field that requires a blend of expertise and creativity. It’s more than just translation, it takes a great deal of localization. With that in mind, you’ll need the support of a reliable translation and localization partner.
Expert localization companies understand the intricacies of localization as a cross-disciplinary practice, especially when it comes to marketing translation. They have teams, technology, and processes in place to offer effective marketing translation.
While choosing a translation company, check their teams of translators, marketing experts, and localization professionals. Professional companies with localization expertise have a huge network of native, in-country language professionals with strong industry-specific expertise, including marketing.
We also recommend that you consider the number of years the company has been operating and its track record of previous marketing translation projects that have been managed over the years.
- 2. Evaluate Their Quality Assurance Process
The quality assurance process a company follows will shape the quality of its translations. For starters, when choosing a company, you need to ensure that their quality is in line with ISO 9001 and 17100 standards.
This means that while translating marketing materials, your translated content should go through a multi-step process (Translation, Editing, and Proofreading) by three different linguists and reviewers, but with the same level of expertise and knowledge of the subject matter. The process is meant to weed out any linguistic or cultural inaccuracies.
Leveraging translation technology to maintain high quality and consistency is also important. You can expect leading translation companies to use dedicated platforms for this. This includes an efficient translation management system, CAT tools, translation memories, terminology management systems, glossaries, and most importantly style guides, in case your business doesn’t have any in place.
You can learn more about bayantech’s top-level quality assurance process and how we guarantee outstanding translation and localization from here.
- 3. Ask For How Customer Support Works
While you focus on your work and let the translation company handle the marketing translation project for you, you will want to reach out to the company for different reasons.
That’s why you need a company that offers great customer service 24/7 through different platforms, so you can either make any inquiries about the process, request changes, provide feedback, or track the progress of the project.
Good communication is critical in marketing, a professional company will definitely need to make the best use of your knowledge about your brand, industry, and target markets to adjust and enhance your translation. And so, they’ll make sure they can keep consistent contact with you.
Marketing Translation Services by bayantech
Translating your marketing materials is no easy task but, with almost two decades of experience, bayantech offers an end-to-end marketing translation service that lets brands rest assured about the quality and effectiveness of their multilingual marketing.
Powered by a huge network of native translators and effective use of technology, bayantech marketing translation checks all the boxes, quality, speed, scale, and cost-efficiency.
bayantech is a leading company in translation services as well as localization and interpreting services in the MENA region and beyond. We have been supporting businesses and organizations in diverse industries since 2004, growing our comprehensive list of specialized linguistic services, powered by our professional multidisciplinary teams. You can contact us at any time to learn more or you can request your free translation service quote now.
