Businesses wanting to serve multilingual and multicultural audiences have a challenge in language barriers. It’s an impediment you’d want to get rid of at the earliest. That’s why translation comes to play such an important role in streamlining foreign expansion.
One prominent feature of the globalized economy is the non-uniformity of language. In terms of language, you don’t have one single dominant linguistic entity dominating the marketplace. On the contrary, there are small regional-language-driven marketplaces calling for businesses to cater to their regional sensibilities, in terms of culture and language, if they want to succeed in such markets.
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One gets the impression of English as the single most dominant language of the world, but it’s the regional dialects and vernaculars that customers speak that are critical for the survival of your business. With that being said, it’s obvious why translation services are inevitable for legal and other industries.
But are there other reasons that render translation necessary? The answer is yes!
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- The translation is vital as consumers find it easier to interact with your business in their native language compared to English.
- The more you offer potential consumers’ service in their native language, the more you earn their trust and sell better and reach a wider audience.
- Businesses with multinational operations need translation of documents such as handbooks, contracts, manuals.
- Professional translation saves you from marketing translation blunders that may harm your business in myriad ways by destroying its brand image.
Why Regional Languages Matter – A Case Study on the Indian Market
The internet in India is no longer English-dominated as there has been a steady rise of regional 1,600+ dialects to reclaim their space in the digital sphere. As a result, we can see today that India’s 22 official languages wield more influence than does English on the Indian population.
That trend is glaringly evident in the sudden drop in the proportion of readers who read English newspapers, to a mere 8%. Concomitant to this drop, the readership of regional language newspapers have skyrocketed and claimed a bigger piece of the pie.
Shift Away from English to Local Languages Gaining Traction and Popularity on the Internet
Speaking of the Indian language user base on the internet, it’s 234 million. By 2021 end, we were to see local Indian languages accounting for 75% of internet users in India. This imminent paradigm shift is on cards.
Therefore, the biggest challenge when entering the grand Indian market is the one posed by regional Indian languages. The responsibility of disseminating the brand message as effectively as possible lies with businesses who’ve got to equip themselves with linguistic power to connect consumers in their language. The aim is not just for the message to reach the target audience but to see to it that it resonates with consumers. And the sure and tested way to do this is by opting for translation services.
Why Localize Your Marketing and Other Content into Regional Languages?
It’s not just the language that changes when you move from one state to another within the Indian market. What else changes, is the culture of people! Consequently, the need to localize your content becomes inevitable. Otherwise, the people may not relate to your branding if it’s alien to their culture.
So you have to creatively translate your business-related content before peddling it for the consumption of your consumer base. And to add to it, you have to do it accurately by hiring professional translators who‘ve got experience and knowledge in the niche industry. Otherwise, mistranslations or translation blunders harm a business’s reputation beyond repair.
How Translation Blunders Harm Your Business?
Translation blunders are real and can cost your business hefty by destroying your brand’s reputation. When you think of mistranslations, the 2009 case that happened with HSBC comes to mind immediately.
A Mistranslation Costs HSBC $10 Million
Instead of translating the “Assume Nothing” slogan properly, the slogan got mistranslated as “Do Nothing” and HSBC had to spend $10 million to rectify the mistake.
When KFC Mistranslated the “Finger-lickin’-good” Tagline as “Eat your fingers off”
A similar case happened when KFC’s “Finger-lickin’-good” tagline was mistranslated as “Eat your fingers off” back in the 1980s when it entered the Chinese market.
You surely don’t want anything of this sort to happen to your business when expanding your business to a foreign country! Who wants the first impression to go wrong, right!
Locate Translate understands the impact language barriers have on businesses functioning overseas. We don’t want the language to be a barrier, we want it to be a bridge between businesses and consumers, and, of course, employees.
How Can Locate Translate Help your Business?
We are quick to handle translations in 30+ language pairs and are equipped to do it accurately and within your budget. Our language translations rank for their accuracy and precision and are free from errors.
Industries like Legal for which Translation is Inevitable
- Legal Industry
- Educational Institutions & eLearning Industry
- Finance Industry
- Healthcare Industry
- Manufacturing Industry
- E-Commerce Industry
- Market Research Industry
- Entertainment and Gaming Industry
- Travel and Tourism Industry
- Human Resources (HR) Industry
1. Legal Industry
Expanding your business to a foreign market has its baggage of legal formalities, litigation issues, etc. Irrespective of the country you’re moving to, these documents have one thing in common – they’re written in the native language of your target country.
You’ll firstly need to translate these legally binding documents before you can even make sense of what they imply. Given the delicacy of legal matters and their institutional use, you need to have a document translation agency by your side to accurately translate your contracts, legal judgments, statements, articles of incorporation, etc.
Legal translation services demand expertise in law, linguistics, and local customs. It’s a prerequisite for accurate legal translation of documents such as visas, licenses, and work permits.
Our Tailored Services for Legal Industry –
Requirements for accurate legal translation:
- A solid understanding of legal terminology and language is pertinent to good legal translation.
Legal diction is unique and fairly complex. That’s why it calls for precision and great linguistic acumen on part of legal translators. A clear understanding of legal terms doesn’t only make translations accurate but precise as well, while translating contracts, agreements, etc.
- Understanding legal systems not only make translation good but also superfast.
Legal systems vary so starkly that it’s hard for criminal law experts to step into the shoes of commercial law experts. The same holds for family and international experts. Having domain expertise is a must to make translations super fast and good.
- Adapting the translation framework to the target language’s conventions is a requirement for a good translation.
Legal conventions have no substitute. They’re the skeleton shaping legal language in the first place. Adapting to it make translations accurate and authentic. Otherwise, the literal translation would mar the text’s meaning and dilute its authenticity.
- Another basic requirement of good legal translation is attestation or certification.
Translations have to be “certified” for attestation and authentication purposes. In translation terminology, it’s called certified translations and is required for documents to be produced before officials or submitted to courts.
2. Educational Institutions & eLearning Industry
It’s true the advent of the internet democratised education. At the same time, the role played by translation to make education accessible to different linguistic groups can’t be overlooked, either. The accurately done academic translation is vital to ensure learning material is understood by learners. Perhaps, how well students understand and retain concepts depend on the translator’s domain expertise and linguistic precision.
We’ve entered into an era where knowledge is free and accessible but language barriers still exist, which can be overcome with the help of educational websites supporting multilingual content.
Steps to Make eLearning Translation Accurate
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Create Content Guidelines
Don’t haste to the content creation process before you’ve laid out proper content creation guidelines. The foundation of these guidelines rests on your research into target audience personas, foreign markets, branding, and messaging.
How you’ll present your content needs to be figured out beforehand because that also impacts how educational content is viewed by learners. You may do so by –
- Avoiding idioms and colloquialisms
- Being clear about what to write, and keeping it simple and concise
- Adding visual content
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Gather eLearning Materials
Put all your content and eLearning materials in one place so that it’s easier to have a look whenever needed. To have it readily available does make the translation process more efficient.
If your eLearning project contains audio-video material as well, make sure that you submit audio-video files in the original when translating.
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Create Glossary and Style Guide
It’s good to have a glossary of terms at your disposal if you want eLearning translations to be accurate. Linguists will need it to ensure textual consistency and accuracy. Also. there’s jargon associated with every domain, and education is no different. You often come across terms that make for jargon, and having a glossary will make eLearning translations more credible.
The style guide will ensure your translator emulates the tone and style you’ve set to be incorporated into your eLearning materials.
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Get a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to Review the Content
Of course, you don’t want errors to creep into your eLearning materials. Getting a subject matter expert to review translations will ensure your content is accurate.
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Use Native Linguists to Translate eLearning Materials
Language proficiency matters when translating eLearning materials. Therefore, always choose native linguists for eLearning translations.
3. Finance Industry
There are two aspects to it. One is Finance as an industry, which will include banks, insurance companies, etc. Another is Finance as a service provider to businesses, which streamlines global financial transactions.
But as a service provider as well as an industry, Finance involves documents to be translated from one language to another. For example, you may need translation of German documents to English.
This may include documents like contracts, financial terms, legal compliances, licenses, regulations, receipts, confirmations, etc. As a result, require back and forth English to German translation service, for example.
Why Hire Specialist Financial Translators?
The field of finance is complex, so is financial translation. It’s a domain for specialist translators only. Without a solid foundation and expertise in financial terminology, carrying out finance translation satisfactorily is unthinkable.
Financial documents adhere to accounting standards like International Financial Reporting Standards or IFRS in short and contain quantitative data. A fair amount of familiarization is required on part of translators with IFRS accounting standards before they can even attempt to perform financial translation.
Also, different countries have adopted different accounting standards, some have IFRS, some GAAP – Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Translators have to adapt to the target countries’ accounting standards to make translation accurate and valid.
Only a specialist translator equipped with linguistic skills and expertise in finance will provide the kind of translation the finance industry demands.
4. Healthcare Industry
Translation in medical and life sciences is a matter of life and death. Here, you’ve no room for errors. All sorts of translation services are required by the healthcare industry, including medicine box translation, transcription, interpretation, etc.
Mistakes to Avoid when Hiring Medical Translators
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Don’t hire translators without a specialization in medical translation
Medical terminology is complex and involves scientific terms. Only a specialized translator can translate medical transcripts, documents, and patient records accurately. Hiring a non-specialised translator might be less expensive but it would cost a patient’s life.
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Don’t hire translators who don’t understand your target audience
The target audience in the healthcare industry is patients and doctors. If your translator fails to understand who is he writing for, he might produce a mediocre and irrelevant translation, viewed so by the target audience.
Translation done for doctors is different compared to patients’. A patient can’t understand medical terms. What concerns him is medical records and reports. Anyway, that just shows how necessary context is, and why translators need to understand their target audience before starting translating.
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Don’t hire translators lacking domain knowledge
Domain knowledge is important for medical translators. That also includes keeping abreast of medical translation best practices. For example, abbreviations can’t be used when translating documents related to healthcare.
5. Manufacturing Industry
With manufacturing operations spread across the world, business translation service has become imperative for manufacturers. Translation of marketing materials, advertising copies, product descriptions, user guides, legal documents, etc are a constant feature if you’re a multination manufacturer.
Over it, the documents being translated are always very important ones – tax forms, compliance forms, licenses, patents – as a result, need certified translation recognized by your target country’s law.
Businesses’ internal communications also need translation service on every front when your workforce is multilingual. Say, for example, communication between various sales and marketing teams can’t take place if the language spoken isn’t common.
The same applies to inventory reports and emails, which beg proper translation by native linguists who ensure error-free translation across languages.
6. E-Commerce Industry
E-commerce has snowballed into a massive global phenomenon and has touched every individual one or another way. Now people access e-commerce websites to shop directly. However, if your website isn’t in the native language people might access it but not buy from your website.
That calls for immediate redressal which website translation and localisation so effectively offers. Having product names, descriptions, reviews, etc in users’ target language establishes trust, loyalty, and helps it resonate with your target audience.
Not everyone understands English, that’s why translation is so important. Clients can understand your business better if it’s adapted to their linguistic and cultural needs. Doing so will give your business an edge over your competition in the international market.
7. Market Research Industry
Market research is important for a business’s success overseas. To market products or services effectively is not possible without market research. But in a foreign market, you can’t do it effectively without professional market research translation.
It’s about adapting to consumers’ cultures and languages. That’s why market research agencies rely on translation services for translating/creating questionnaires and surveys in consumers’ local languages.
8. Entertainment and Gaming Industry
Alongside market globalisation, cultural globalisation, too, has gained momentum over the years. As a result, we now have movies from countries like Iran, Spain, China, India being streamed across the globe.
Translation services like subtitling and voice-overs have made it possible to consume video content in any language. Translation has given the entertainment industry tremendous reach and a wider audience. To reap its benefits, the entertainment and gaming industry need translation service of the highest quality.
Think of Game of Thrones or Money Heist, which Netflix and Amazon helped deliver to millions of users worldwide. The kind of massive international success they enjoy, borders on translation. The same applies to Assassin’s Creed and other such games, which have been turned into a worldwide craze by game translation and localisation.
9. Travel and Tourism Industry
International travel certainly is at its peak. With visa norms relaxed, availability of cheaper accommodations and flights, and multiple operators to choose from, the travel and tourism industry has seen staggering growth.
What else has happened along the way is the rise of multilingual travel sites, which travellers content in multiple languages. Even printed brochures in visitors’ native language are made available to travellers. So, translation service is imperative for the travel and tourism industry.
10. Human Resources (HR) Industry
Communication can harness the true potential of your employees and help them align with your business’s vision. HR can incite behavioural change in employees. To ensure cultural acceptance, HR needs to propagate your business’s belief system, which is impossible to achieve without speaking in their language.
A break in communication due to language barriers is detrimental to a business’s success and efficiency. Consequently, translation service in the HR industry has become indispensable.
Conclusion
Incorporating translation into daily business operations is needed for legal, medical, and all other industries as well. Besides industries whose reliance upon translations we’ve discussed above in some detail, we’ve also seen demand for patent translations steadily rising.
The same holds for IT industries where the specialized translation is keeping translators occupied owing to the sheer volume of projects being pitched for services like website translation, software localisation, video game localisation, etc.
Coming to the diversification of translation, new domains have given rise to ingenious translation services, notables being:
- Humanitarian translation,
- Computer translation, and
- Biotech translation.
All major industries inevitably need translation services. Industries we’ve discussed above aren’t the only ones. Other sectors that need translation, include:
- Logistics
- Military
- Government
- Hospitality
- Automative
- Technology
Have a translation project in mind? Locate Translate could help. With our vast expertise, we offer translation services to every industry in 30+ languages at competitive prices. Contact hello@locatetranslate.co.uk for project enquiries or call Locate Translate directly +44 208 609 4852.
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