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, 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" 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. This 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. Your country managers are involved from the outset in selecting the right style and voice of translation and direct liaison is maintained on an ongoing basis if that’s what you need.
Translation within a company can be a contentious issue at the best of times. Country managers often feel they are left out of the process and will often quite rightly complain about the quality of material translated.
We pride ourselves on overcoming all of these problems through the correct processes right from the start:
- Your country managers are involved from the outset 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, so the creative elements of the original copy are not lost in translation. 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.
Your translated documents returned the way you need them
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:
- QuarkXpressInDesign
- Pagemaker
- Framemaker
- Microsoft Office
- Freehand
- Illustrator
- Photoshop
